


Alternate Ending

by ivorygates



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Daniverse, Dark, F/M, Girl!Daniel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-12
Updated: 2013-01-12
Packaged: 2017-11-25 05:10:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 57,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/635454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>It's been almost seven years that she's been here on The Other Side now.</em> </p>
<p> <em>They have both a quantum mirror and a time machine, and have had for years.  But the time machine won't travel merely seven years into the past, and the quantum mirror can't find the place she needs to be.</em> </p>
<p>Like the title says, an alternate ending to "A Mirror For Observers".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alternate Ending

It's been almost seven years that she's been here on The Other Side now.

They have both a quantum mirror and a time machine, and have had for years. But the time machine won't travel merely seven years into the past, and the quantum mirror can't find the place she needs to be.

Jack stepped up to Washington two years ago, and they got someone new at the SGC: Major General Hank Landry. Jack picked him out himself, apparently.

Sam had already left for Area 51 to take over R&D there.

By the time Jack turned over the SGC, Daniel was making plans to go to Atlantis, in _Daedalus_. He was going to be gone for a year at least.

#

"A year," she says. She's in his office, watching him pack. It looks as if he's taking every book he owns. A year is a long time.

She wonders if Landry will want to put her up to head Archaeo-Anthropology and Translation when Daniel has gone. She wonders if he'll do that and still let her stay an A/T Float, as she is now. Daniel headed the department as a member of SG-1, after all.

So did she, on The Other Side.

A place she'll never see again.

"Maybe longer than a year," Daniel says absently. He's trying to fit more books into a box than it can actually hold. He's leaving in three weeks and he hasn't even started on his files yet. "It depends on what I find."

He sets the last book into the box, closes it. Picks up another box.

"I'll miss you," she says wistfully.

She thinks of Daniel's absence. Jack is in Washington now. Sam is at Area 51. Teal'c is on Dakara. The _doppelgangers_ of the real SG-1, but they have grown to become friends, over the years. The only close friends she has, because they are the only ones who know who she really is. Now Daniel is going too, and what could she possibly say? He's wanted to go to Atlantis for as long as she's known him.

He glances up, the empty box untouched on the table between them.

"Come along," he suggests. He smiles. It's that coaxing expression he gets when he's trying to talk her into doing something silly. Or reckless. 'Silly' and 'reckless' aren't really things Dr. Dana Ballard is known for here, though Dr. Danielle Jackson was legendary for taking insane risks…

Back home.

Jack hated that.

She looks away.

Gone a year.

Or more.

She'd like to go with him. She's not that bad at Ancient by now, and there are all those new cultures to study, as well. The Wraith are too dangerous to study directly, but they do sound, well, _interesting._

She looks up. Smiles regretfully. It will never happen. 

"I'd like to. Not up to me."

General Landry - and oh god, she misses Jack, even though he wouldn't even have let _Daniel_ go - will hardly let both his top archaeo-linguists go dashing off to Pegasus Galaxy.

"There's a way," Daniel says.

He hesitates, and she regards him curiously.

"They won't split up married couples. They didn't on the Pegasus Mission."

It takes her a moment to understand what he's suggesting.

Marry him so she can go.

"They won't just kick you off?"

She won't jeopardize his chances of going. She would never do anything to hurt Daniel, no matter what it cost her.

He shakes his head. "They've been asking for me for months, ever since, well, there was going to be a new SG-1. They really need me there. They could use you, too."

She thinks about it, spellbound by the idea. It seems like madness, but he must have thought it through. General Landry won't like it, but Atlantis isn't under SGC jurisdiction. It's an international mission under civilian oversight. Daniel is being loaned out in order to go. Her position here, a mere A/T Float, is hardly as rarified as his. On paper, at least. They'd hardly miss her.

There's going to be a new SG-1. Some Colonel named Mitchell will head it. The gossip's already circulating. She knows she could manage to get posted to the new team if she tries. Permanently.

Back on SG-1 again. A new SG-1.

The wrong SG-1.

She doesn't want to have to miss Daniel for a year. Or more.

"Marry me, then?" she says.

He smiles again. "Since you ask so nicely…"

#

That weekend they fly to Las Vegas and marry. Fast and legal is better than anything else; they are both in complete agreement on that point.

It is his second marriage, her first. She is, if she wishes to claim the name, Dr. Jackson once more. But it has been seven years. Her false name has become real to her now. More real than this marriage of convenience. It is merely a way to go to Atlantis, after all.

To stay with Daniel.

It feels extraordinarily odd to be married to Daniel, even though it does - should - change nothing. They are not, after all, she tells herself, in love.

On the Monday morning following their marriage they go to see General Landry together. The interview is brief, painful, and very loud. She resigns from the Gate Teams and takes a desk job, but it's only temporary.

She's going to Pegasus.

To Atlantis.

#

In the next three weeks she's too busy to notice whether or not she's married anyway. She packs her apartment and sends everything she owns into storage. When they get back she'll rent a new apartment and decant her life back into it.

Get a divorce.

Hardly fair to stay married, after all. It's only for convenience. For legality. A pretext so that she can go.

It's not impossible, after all, that someday Daniel will find someone he wants to love and marry. That's what people do.

She tells herself that.

Fortunately there isn't much of her office to pack, except off to storage. Most of her research and reference material duplicates his. She packs the few items that don't. They're ready just in time.

They go, leaving everything familiar and known behind.

Nothing new about that.

#

On _Daedalus_ they are treated as a couple. Husband and wife. It's hard for her to accept at first. She's gotten so used to hiding their relationship - the full extent of their relationship. It's not exactly forbidden - they're both civilian consultants, and they're not on the same Gate Team, so their relationship is okay under the Fraternization Regulations - and the number of people at the SGC who know that she's Daniel's quantum double is fewer every year, between deaths and transfers - but hiding their affair has become a habit.

Only they're no longer having an affair.

Here they are a married couple. Expected to be … doing all the things that married people do. And nobody on _Daedalus_ knows who she … was.

Daniel seems to think her shyness and embarrassment every time he takes her hand in public are insanely funny.

By the time they reach Atlantis, she agrees.

#

They spend eighteen months in Atlantis. They make a lot of interesting discoveries. She makes one important one.

She loves Daniel.

She's _in love_ with Daniel.

And has been almost from the beginning.

Which is all right as it seems he was just waiting for her to notice so that he could tell her what he's felt for a long time.

Love.

#

There's some communication with Earth, though not a lot. She gets an email from Sam that boils down to 'I can't believe you married Daniel just to get to Atlantis' - which is silly, as the Sam Carter Dani knows best would have done far more reckless things in pursuit of her own field of scientific endeavor, and she tells Daniel so.

And anyway, she explains to him, it was more the thought of not seeing him for a year than seeing Atlantis that led to the marriage.

Then they go home to Earth.

To Daniel's.

Home will be Daniel's place now, with minor changes. When she'd left, she'd been assuming they'd get a divorce as soon as they returned, so she'd simply had the contents of her apartment packed and put into storage, ready to be decanted into some other anonymous living space. Now she'll have to go through it all, decide what she wants to keep, and get rid of the rest.

It seems strange to be back in a normal Earth house after all this time. It makes everything seem more real.

Makes being married to Daniel seem more real.

This universe is her reality now, forever, and for the first time, the knowledge brings more than acceptance. She's happy.

It is seven years since Kelowna. Time to let go of the past.

She has a future now.

#

"Jack brought us a present," Daniel says, walking in to the living room. He's holding a box wrapped in silver paper, a paper suitable for weddings. Jack has undoubtedly heard and this is his oblique commentary.

Their mail has been going to the SGC. Jack probably dropped this off here in person on one of his jaunts through town. She's sure he has keys to Daniel's house.

"Careful with that," she warns.

Daniel tears the wrapping off, with a reckless disregard for its possible contents.

It's a DVD giftset. One of the Deluxe Anniversary Editions. _The Wizard of Oz._

Jack's favorite movie, there and here. The memory makes her smile. He'd been as personally indignant to discover she'd never seen it as he had been to find she'd never seen Star Trek. He'd made her watch it at once.

She'd actually found him more fascinating than the movie. What was it about a movie - this movie - that could resonate with him so? And because she was curious, she'd watched it over and over. She grew to like it, but she always had the maddening feeling that Jack understood something about the movie that she didn't.

She takes the box from Daniel's hands. Daniel is just looking puzzled. She wraps her arms around the box, holding it to her chest.

"I wanted to see it again," she says softly.

#

She's curled up next to him, tucked under his arm, watching a movie she - and probably he - has watched dozens of times.

She thinks she's figured it out now.

Dorothy went everywhere - even to Oz - looking for where she belonged, only to end up where she started from. She was home all along and had never needed to do all that looking.

Maybe that's why Jack liked the movie. Jack was always in favor of doing things the simple way. Or… not doing them at all.

For the first time in - how long? - she thinks of the Furling riddle. The second one. In the end, nobody had to send her anywhere. Time itself did the work of arranging for her to end up in the proper time and the proper place and where she belonged: here. She rubs her cheek against Daniel's shoulder sleepily. Between changing time-zones - the ship keeps one and Colorado keeps another - they're both more than a little tired. They probably won't get all the way to the end of the movie tonight.

"I just realized something," she says.

Daniel - he sounds even sleepier than she feels - makes a faint interrogative noise.

"There's no place like home," she says.

As she speaks the words, she vanishes.

#

She's standing on the steps of the Stargate in the Kelownan museum. She's in uniform. SG-1.

This has been the scene of her nightmares for seven years.

She grabs her radio - as she has done so many times in dreams - and calls a Code One. Begs the others to get to the Gate immediately. Goes to the DHD and dials. Transmits the code to open the iris.

Sammy comes. Teal'c. Jack.

They go through.

#

They are in the Gate Room. General Hammond is there. She stares at him, at her teammates. She hasn't seen them for seven years.

How are they here? How is _she_ here?

She is not dreaming. This is real. And somehow, the fact that it is not a dream, that it is real, makes it even more of a nightmare, when once it would have been her dearest hope.

It still should be.

But Daniel is lost to her. A moment ago she was sitting warm and safe and loved in his arms.

No one to love her now.

She gets halfway down the ramp before passing out.

She wakes up in the Infirmary. Her dosimeter is black, indicating that there were high levels of radiation on Kelowna.

Janet is there.

Janet has been dead for almost nine years in The Other Reality.

She's back. Not home - this is no longer home - but back.

She could dismiss the last seven years as one of those incredibly vivid hallucinations they've all had from time to time except for a few minor facts.

Her ears are pierced. She did that on The Other Side. She has a number of scars she picked up there that are new to Janet.

It was all real.

She went there missing Jack and is back missing Daniel with the same devastating sense of loss.

This strikes her as so hysterically funny that Janet has to sedate her. Heavily.

#

When she finally wakes up - completely - it's 'night' in the Infirmary. She's alone, off in a corner, with as much privacy as it's possible to get. She wonders if Janet has figured out what's wrong with her yet.

She wonders what _is_ wrong with her.

She wonders what she's going to tell them. Her friends. Her teammates. _'I've been to the future'? 'To an alternate universe'?_ General Hammond will want an explanation, and what does she say?

"Oh, god, Daniel, what am I going to do?" she groans.

"That's a tough one," a familiar voice answers.

She squeaks, faintly, and is mortified. Members of SG-1 do not squeak.

She's a member of SG-1 again.

But Daniel is standing there beside her bed.

"I'm losing my mind," she says.

"No," he assures her. "You really are home. Back in your own universe. Just after the Kelowna mission."

Just after Kelowna means almost nine years ago relative to The Other Side… which means just after Daniel died in his own universe.

It takes her a moment to put it all together.

He is an Ascended Being now.

She reaches out a hand. He looks solid, but there's nothing there to touch.

She feels obscurely relieved.

"What happened to me?" she demands. "Why am I here?"

"I'm pretty sure you'll figure that out eventually," he answers.

#

He doesn't know her.

He's never met her.

She's his wife.

He loves her.

Or… he's going to.

He's dead.

He isn't dead.

He's transcendent.

He's Ascended.

It isn't the way he'd expected it would be. He did, actually, have expectations. He's studied enough different cultures - Earthly, alien - and philosophies to know something - more than a little - about the whole idea of Enlightenment. Transcendence. Being and nothingness.

He realizes - now - that he would have been a lot better prepared if he'd been studying quantum physics.

Because, yes, it's all about Buddhism and Zen and letting go and becoming one with everything, sure. But nobody warned him that time and space and causality were all just going to become … suggestions.

Events were going to happen before causes.

Everything was going to happen at once. Everywhere.

And not only everything that would happen…

Everything that _could_ happen.

He can see universes in which he never joined the Stargate Program.

Universes in which there is no Stargate Program.

Universes in which there is no Stargate.

And her.

How can he be married to her - going to be married to her - if he's dead - well, Ascended?

That's just confusing.

You don't - he's fairly sure - just stop being dead. Ascended.

Maybe it's some other Daniel Jackson.

Only he's pretty sure it isn't.

The trouble with this Ascended business is that they aren't gods. Neither omniscient nor omnipotent; just more so than Unascended humans. Maybe power and understanding grow with time, but right now what he can do and see bears a maddening kinship to those Whack-a-Mole games that Jack was - _is,_ because Jack isn't dead - so fond of: he can see one thing at a time - it sort of pops up - but the others vanish, and in his Ascended state, out of sight equals out of mind. Hard to get the big picture that way.

What he can see right now is that this woman - Dani - Danielle Jackson - who is now back in her own universe - has just come from _his_ universe.

Where she knows him.

Here, she _is_ him.

Sister, lover, wife, twin.

It has a mythological resonance that seems fitting, somehow.

He can figure the whole thing out, but it will take a lot of time and study. More time than he really has right now. He's needed elsewhere.

He chose to walk the Great Path so that he could make a difference, after all.

But her pain called him. They're linked. Looking at her - _into_ her - he can see a story that makes no sense to him.

But her pain, her terror, are very real.

He wants to - has to - help her.

But he knows he also has to be very careful.

There are rules.

He - she - both of them - could do so much harm.

#

_"Daniel!"_ she says, sitting up. "If you know, why won't you just tell me?"

"Isn't that what you really want to talk about? What you ought to tell people as opposed to what you know?"

She pulls her knees up and rests her chin on them. "I don't suppose that they'll accept that I'm not telling them for their own good."

"You could try that."

"But what if something bad starts to happen that I could prevent?"

He smiles at her rather sadly. "Dani, right now I can see… so much. Things I can't even begin to describe. And _I'm_ not qualified to do that kind of meddling with the future. It will be hard, but best thing - the only thing - you can do is …nothing."

How does he know her? They won't even meet for another two years. In his universe.

Her past. His future.

But he knows her _now._

How can he? She wishes she could ask, but she's pretty sure he won't tell. They know so little about the Ascended, really, even on The Other Side. And he remembered nothing from the - two - times he … died. What he did tell the others - the little he told them - was mostly about how he couldn't tell them anything. Or interfere.

Though according to the mission reports she read, he did both.

And what about her? Here? Now?

"Janet's going to die if I don't warn Sammy and General Hammond."

Janet died in Daniel's universe. Dani has no reason to think events here will go any differently. All the events leading up to Kelowna have gone just the same on both sides.

"Yes."

"Daniel, can't you at least tell me that it will be worse if I meddle in the future than if I don't?"

He sighs and shakes his head. "I can't. I don't think you should. I don't think anyone should try to make the future go a particular way. I know it will be hard for you to have that knowledge and not use it. I haven't been Ascended long, and it's hard for me not to fix the things I see. But that's the kind of choice there is."

Choice? Between what and what?

She hears the sound of the door to the hallway opening. She glances toward it, and when she looks back, Daniel is gone.

Jack walks in.

He smiles, just a little.

She shakes her head slightly.

She doesn't care any more.

Nothing left inside but an ache.

The universe has played hideous jokes on her before, but this is by far the worst: that she should - finally - get the real Jack back and simply not care.

Oh, god, it didn't hurt this much when Sha're died. When she lost Skaara to Klorel. Of course, she was young and stupid then.

Not quite as young now, but apparently still stupid.

Jack takes a chair and sits by the bed.

"So," he says, "you want to talk about it?"

She closes her eyes. Daniel was here and she could not touch him. She will never touch him again. And Jack is here now, knowing nothing of Daniel, or Daniel's world, thinking it has been hours instead of years since the last time she and he have seen each other. He wants answers. She knows he does; that's why he's here. When things don't add up to his satisfaction Jack O'Neill pokes at them like a bored child until they do. Apparently, at the moment, she's something that doesn't add up. But she hasn't had time to come up with a story yet.

"I dialed home," she says. "I called you first."

"And… you called a Code One. Nuclear War? On Kelowna? How were they going to have a nuclear war? We only saw the one _naquaadriah_ device."

"It went off."

That gets his full attention. His eyes narrow. He studies her intently.

She wishes she knew what he knows. There's something, to make him look at her this way.

She catches herself wishing desperately to go home, and realizes that she can't, because she is. This is home, and she is here. Lost and cut off from everything familiar and loved.

She takes a deep breath. Clears her throat.

"Jonas and I were down in the facility; the one we'd toured the previous day. I was trying to explain to him that building bombs for peace was a stupid idea. The _naquaadriah_ core they were working on went into overload. The scientists panicked and fled the lab. I shot out the window and tried to get down inside to stop the reaction. Jonas tried to protect me. And I guess the bomb went off."

Everything she has just said has been absolutely true.

Jack looks at her unreadably. "Indy, if the bomb went off, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

"Dialed back to Kelowna yet to explain to the First Minister why we left in such a hurry?" she asks.

Jack doesn't say anything.

"Lose a MALP?" she asks.

"The DNA screen says it's you," Jack says, but his voice is suspicious now. "When'd you get your ears pierced, Indy?"

Oh.

That's what has him on edge.

She hadn't thought of that. She hadn't thought.

She's been gone for seven years, five and more of that spent on a Gate Team. Her body carries a record of those years in scars and broken bones, one the Furlings did not - apparently - erase in sending her back. Just as they did not erase the fact that Other Sam teased her into getting her ears pierced for her birthday one year. Janet will have recorded all of it by now; a series of datapoints to add to the puzzle. She's not sure how long she's been unconscious; certainly more - much more - than a day if Daniel has come to her. It took him - so the records say - three days to die and Ascend on The Other Side.

And so the conversation she is having now is a …mirror image… of her confrontation with the Other Jack when she first arrived on The Other Side. Other-Jack didn't believe she could be any version of Daniel Jackson. And the real Jack doesn't believe that she's the real Danielle Jackson.

"A while ago. It's a long story."

One she has no intention of telling.

"I've got time," Jack says.

This is not home, but he is Jack. The two incompatible truths make her dizzier than any residual medication could.

And she owes him answers. Because she has always answered him when he asked. Because he kept her alive on The Other Side, even though he wasn't there.

Because…

Because she loves him. Still. Again. Always. Although she has lost Daniel and loves Daniel and the pain of that makes her feel as if she is drowning. And it is a pain she must pretend not to feel.

Jack thinks she can't lie, and he's right. But there's a difference between lying and hiding the truth. She can hide the truth very well, providing nobody asks. She's doing it now.

But she'll have to give him something.

"You remember the Furlings?" she asks.

"Bunch of aliens we never met?" Jack asks, after a pause.

"Last not seen on PHX-1138," she says lightly. "One of them came for me outside the lab - after I'd taken a lethal dose of radiation. It took me somewhere else. Then it brought me back to the Stargate - and I called you and dialed us home."

Everything she has just said is completely true. Round two to her as well.

"Where did it take you?" Jack says.

This is going to be the hard part.

"I think it took me to Stargate Command. For a while. Then back to the Kelownan Stargate. But I can't have been here, because Janet wouldn't have been so confused when she saw me. I don't think… Jack, the more I think about it, the less sense it makes. And I'm not even sure it was a Furling; it's not as if we've ever been formally introduced, you know. It could have been any deranged super-powerful alien lunatic. What was the point? If it had that much power, it could have stopped the explosion and saved all those people, not just me…"

And what she has said this time has been nearly all true.

She starts to cry then, great wracking sobs - from losing Daniel, from lying to Jack. Because it is true: nobody ever had to die at all: the Furlings, with their enormous power, could simply have stopped the explosion entirely.

But they'd sacrificed thousands - maybe millions - of people just for a suitable pretext to meddle with her.

Why?

And now she's here again. Because they're done with her?

Or because they want to play some more?

She is slightly surprised when Jack moves from the chair to the bed and gathers her into his arms, but she feels so lost right now that the comfort is welcome, even though he's been gone so long - or she has - that he seems unfamiliar now. He's seen her cry before. That much is nothing new.

#

He wishes he knew what really happened to her.

He's never seen her like this. Obviously terrified half out of her mind and still trying to lie to him about it.

She doesn't want anyone to know … something. Including him and General Hammond.

She's pretty smart about a lot of things. Not so smart about others.

She doesn't scare easy.

Half the time she isn't scared when she should be.

She's scared now.

She obviously doesn't think it's anything Stargate Command can fix, or she'd be demanding that they Do Something Right Now.

Wherever she's been, she was gone a while. Fraiser says some of those 'new' scars are years old.

A few new broken bones, long-healed.

They were treating her for her allergies, wherever she was.

She's been offworld, someplace other than Kelowna. The burn-mark left by a Jaffa staff weapon is pretty distinctive.

She always tries to stick close to the truth when she lies. Tries to lie.

She's probably telling the truth about having been taken to Stargate Command.

_A_ Stargate Command, anyway.

Just not this one.

And then brought back here.

What the hell happened there?

And why doesn't she want to tell anyone?

#

She cries herself out, still no closer to a solution.

"Sorry," she says.

She always seems to be saying that to Jack.

"What are friends for?"

He hands her the box of Kleenex from the bedside table. She mops her face, blows her nose. Sits up.

"So," Jack says.

Back to Topic A.

"I really don't remember anything," she says.

He sighs. "You're gonna have to remember sometime." A warning.

"I really don't think so."

He gets up. Pats her on the shoulder. "Why don't you get some sleep? General Hammond's going to want to see you as soon as Fraiser lets you out of here."

She nods. This isn't over. She knows that.

"Goodnight, Indy."

Nobody has called her that in almost seven years.

"Goodnight, Jack."

She lies down.

He goes to the door. Stops. "Hey. Were you… talking to somebody? Just before I came in?"

She stiffens all over, knowing as she does so that she's telegraphing guilt. "There wasn't anyone here, Jack. You saw."

"Right. Sure."

When he leaves, it takes her a long time to fall asleep.

#

Janet sits in on the debriefing. As Dani had suspected, the amount of information her body has given up is appalling: not simply the fact that she was elsewhere at all - and got her ears pierced there - but that she was there long enough - years - for scars to become old. And apparently Jaffa staff blasts leave distinctive scars, so they know she was somewhere that she could have taken one.

Jack is playing fair - or General Hammond is. They have Janet make her report first, so Dani knows what she's up against.

"Dr. Jackson?"

That's her now. Again. Not Daniel.

She's had time to come up with a story. Well, not a story. A strategy. Because, having talked to Jack in the Infirmary, she knows that no story other than the truth will work.

And she has no intention of telling the truth.

But she tells some of it. She tells General Hammond that she was in the _naquaadriah_ lab with Jonas Quinn. That the core went into overload. That she tried to stop it and failed. That an alien - of a race she cannot positively identify - came and took her away.

"And… it transported me to the Stargate, where I called a Code One and brought the rest of SG-1 home before the explosion that … probably destroyed Kelowna City … happened. Certainly - from what Janet says - something happened in between, and…." She stops, shaking her head.

"And you don't remember any of it?" Sammy asks, when it is obvious she is going to say nothing further.

She shakes her head again.

She remembers all of it.

Daniel.

She feels her eyes swell with tears she will not shed. She takes off her glasses, rubs at them. They'll mark it down to frustration, exhaustion, maybe even fear. It doesn't matter.

"Why would this … creature … do such a thing?" General Hammond asks.

"I have no idea," she says. And this is the absolute truth. She still doesn't know why the Furlings did what they did.

Daniel says she'll figure it out eventually. She hopes he's right.

But when the Furlings come, at least she will be here to stop them from presenting General Hammond with their dangerous gifts.

Jack is looking at her. She looks away.

"I'm sorry, General. I know this doesn't make a lot of sense…" she says.

General Hammond sighs. "A lot of things I hear around this table don't make a great deal of sense, Dr. Jackson. I'm just as glad to have the four of you back here safe and sound. We've been trying to establish communication with Kelowna since you returned, and so far, we haven't had any success. Very well, then. Dismissed."

They all rise.

#

Jack walks her back to her office. Inevitable.

"Little different story back there than what you told me," he says.

"I've forgotten," she says.

"Furlings? Alternate SGC?"

"I've forgotten," she insists. Her voice shakes.

"Don't lie to me, Danielle."

He never calls her by her full name. Never.

They walk into her office. He closes the door.

"I need to know."

"No, Jack."

"'No..?'"

"If you have ever … trusted me. My judgment. My opinion. Trust me now. Please. Just… believe what I told General Hammond. I don't remember anything else. Everything I told you… It's gone. Like a dream."

"Why?"

"Please, Jack."

"Dani-"

"You have to trust me."

"To lie to me."

"Yes." She has to admit that much. Because he knows it's a lie. He knows her.

"You're the world's worst liar, Indiana."

"Yeah, well, that's why I need your help, Jack."

He doesn't like it. He really doesn't. But he does trust her. She knows that.

"Think about it," he says.

He'll give her a little time to think things over. But that, she suspects, is all.

#

He doesn't say anything to General Hammond; more grace than she could have asked for.

He doesn't leave it alone, though. He can't. She didn't really think he could, though she'd hoped.

A month later she resigns from the SGC. The rest of SG-1 is offworld at the time. She hasn't been cleared for offworld missions yet.

The Furlings haven't come.

#

She almost manages to get away before they get back. Craven of her to want to slip away like a thief in the night; these are her dearest, closest friends. But it hurts too much.

She cries for Daniel every night, and can admit she mourns him to no one. He isn't even dead, only lost to her.

She loves Jack - still - and has alienated him thoroughly. He's hoped that she'd break her silence, and she hasn't.

He's disappointed with her, and that hurts more than she imagined. Or remembers. They used to disagree about everything. They used to fight constantly. Over policy, tactics, methods. She can't fight him now. Silence is her only defense. It seems like betrayal.

No matter how much they fought she has never betrayed Jack - even loving Daniel. It hurts, pain on pain.

Jack will die soon - she's certain of it - if she doesn't intervene.

She won't intervene.

She has to leave. It's the only thing she can think of to do. Go as far away as she can.

She wants to go overseas - Egypt - but the State Department revokes her passport when she resigns from the SGC. Not a lot of point to asking General Hammond to let her retire offworld either; he'd probably refuse, and she'd be much too easy to find on Abydos. She wants to vanish. It should be possible, even in the US, and in a few years she may be able to get overseas anyway.

She's timed things carefully. The mission SG-1 is on should keep them offworld for two weeks. She works quickly.

Her books and papers go to storage to be called for later. The rest - antiques, artifacts - she ships to museums and an auction service. She's packed what she's taking with her; it isn't much. Everything that remains will be picked up later by local charities; she's made arrangements with the landlord.

#

"Thought you were going to just slip out on us?"

Jack, Sammy, and Mr. T walk in. She's left the door open, expecting the pickup for the couch. She doesn't really need to stay for it. She's just waiting for the traffic to lighten up before she goes.

She looks at them. There's no point in denying it. The living room of her loft is empty of furniture, except for the couch, which is going to charity. Filled with boxes, also going to charity: linens, dishware, clothing she'll no longer need. And they'll already have spoken to General Hammond; that's why they're here.

"Hi, guys," she says resignedly.

They'd been supposed to be gone another week.

"Dani, what were you thinking?" Sammy demands. She sounds exasperated. Hurt. A little angry. More than a little.

"I was going to say goodbye." By email. From a safe distance. "Beer?" There's still beer in the fridge.

Without waiting for a reply, she goes into the kitchen.

Sammy follows her.

"Dani? Come on. This is me. Talk to me."

Sammy is her closest friend.

Sammy is going to die.

In one sense, Sammy is already dead.

"I just got tired of talking to MacKenzie." To whom she has been saying precisely nothing - one of the reasons she has not been recertified for offworld.

Maybe - she thinks, now, when it's too late - she should have come up with a convincing story for MacKenzie. If she'd managed to get offworld, she could have gotten away from the others and just … run. She knows enough Gate addresses. They'd never have caught up with her.

But she knows in her heart that she could never have done that. Could not have betrayed Jack, betrayed any of them, that way.

"I guess I thought it was time to move on," she tells Sammy.

"Without saying anything to anybody?" Sammy isn't buying it.

Dani shrugs. She's here saying things to Sammy now.

_Goodbye, and goodbye, and goodbye._

She has cried so much in the past week that her eyes are dry now. Cried for a husband she has lost. For a lover she will never have.

"Dani, what really happened on Kelowna? Why won't you tell us?"

_I died. You all died. You were dead for seven years. I went to the future and I lived there and now I'm living nine years in the past and I don't dare tell anyone…_

_And I'll never see my husband again._

"Have a beer?"

#

Beer for the three of them, Gatorade - she'd stocked up for the trip - for Teal'c.

Jack is not a happy camper.

Well, this isn't one of the better days of her life, either.

"So… Hammond said you resigned for 'personal reasons.'" Jack says.

It isn't really a question.

"Yeah."

"Behind our backs?"

"If you like."

"Sure looks that way to me." Jack's voice is toneless. He's furious.

"You were offworld."

"You could have waited."

"It's really something I need to do."

"Because of Kelowna," Jack says.

She can't tell him she doesn't remember what happened there. She doesn't dare. They both know it isn't true.

"That's right," she says evenly.

Sammy glances at Jack, and she realizes that the two of them must have talked about this. Talked about her. Teal'c, too, she's sure. What has Jack said to them? Probably everything he knows. They're a team, after all.

Were a team.

Not her. Not any more.

She has betrayed her family.

It is the one thing Jack will never forgive.

She does not know if it is better or worse that he should hate her. She knows she deserves it, even if she hurts too much to reason out why just now.

He was right in the first place, when he hadn't wanted to take her to Abydos. She wasn't good enough. Somehow, later, she'd tricked him. Fooled him somehow into believing in her. If he hadn't, none of this ever would have happened.

"Dani, whatever it is, let us help," Sammy says. Begging her.

She can't bear it. Her eyes hurt, but there are no tears left.

_Goodbye and goodbye and goodbye._

"It's… nothing anybody can really help me with," she says carefully. "Just something I have to work out for myself. By myself."

"But you'll come back?" Sammy says. "When you're done?"

Hoping.

"When I'm done."

They'll all be done soon. Over and done. In about four years, or five, Anubis will destroy the world. Him and the Replicators.

Daniel won't be here to stop him.

If she meddled - if she told them everything she knows, right now - she could stop it. Or make it happen. Or make something worse happen.

What could be worse?

Does she want to find out?

Better to leave now, before she's tempted to do the wrong thing.

To try to make Jack believe in her again.

She knows she cannot stand by and watch Jack die if she could possibly stop it.

Or any of them die.

Not again.

And - probably - they'll all be dead before that.

Way to bet, anyway.

Teal'c watches her silently. As always, she suspects he knows - or guesses - far more than he says aloud.

Sammy asks her what her plans are. Trying to make conversation. As if this were a normal leave-taking. As if this were not forever. She admits she doesn't really have any. A vacation. A job in a few months.

The words are someone else's words. Scripted lines. She looks at her hands, at the floor, anywhere but at Jack.

"Hard to imagine you taking a vacation," Sammy says.

"Hard to imagine her _quitting,"_ Jack says bitterly.

She wonders who will replace her on SG-1.

Whether her replacement will be the one who will kill them.

Jonas replaced Daniel - or will, in a few months - on The Other Side.

It's an interesting asymmetry. Jonas can't replace her here. He's dead. Everyone in Kelowna City is dead.

Jonas saved their lives - more than once - though Jack-there hated to admit it.

Jonas isn't here. She won't be here either.

Eventually, the others leave.

She hugs Sammy goodbye.

_Goodbye, and goodbye, and goodbye._

Teal'c tells her to be well.

She will miss them both.

She'd kiss Jack goodbye - she wants to - but it is not possible now, if it ever was. She will die, he will die, and she will never have kissed him.

Oh, she was right, all those years ago on Abydos.

Love is stupid, dangerous, and it hurts.

If she'd never loved Daniel, would any of this have happened?

By nightfall she is several hundred miles away.

#

It is a year later. She is living - has been living for quite some time in fact - in a small border town in California called Palos Verdes, an odd name as nothing anywhere around is even remotely green or wooded.

Like water, she has sought and found her level. A tiny rental bungalow in the cheapest part of town. She has savings, and money gained from selling nearly everything of value that she owns, but it won't last forever.

It should, however, last until the end of the world.

And really, she doesn't want - or think she deserves - any better accommodations.

Her books are still in storage. They're paid up five years in advance. Which should certainly be through the end of the world. There is a certain bleak and terrible comfort to having an expiration date. She does not need to survive forever. Just that long. She thinks she can manage five years.

She's covered her tracks as well as she can. Her money is in one of those Internet bank accounts. She doesn't use her credit cards. She pays for everything in cash. She really should just have gotten rid of all of her books, she thinks now. But it would have taken too long, and she hadn't been thinking clearly. She'd thought she might want them.

She'd still had delusions that she was going to create a new life.

This is not a life. This is a long goodbye. A wake. Daniel deserves it. Jack deserves it.

O'Neill. Irish. An Irish wake.

When Death comes to Earth there will be no one left behind to mourn, so she had better mourn them now.

She's had no contact with the SGC since she left. She'd like to think no one knows where she is, but she's sure they can find her if they try. With a little warning, though, she could get over the border and into Mexico, and from there, down into Central America fairly easily. There are places in the Yucatan where nobody could find her.

She thinks she'll go anyway. In a few months. She doesn't need a passport for a daytrip over the border. In Tijuana she can buy false papers, work her way further south. Just vanish.

Obliteration. Oblivion. Amnesia.

She thinks of all the times SG-1 had their memories erased or tampered with and fought so hard to get them back. She'd give anything now not to know what she knows.

She drinks too much. There's a fine line between heavy drinker and 'alcoholic,' and she's not sure whether or not she's crossed it yet, though if she hasn't, she knows she will soon. Tequila softens the pain. Of knowing too much. Of not knowing enough. Are her friends dead yet?

Daniel isn't dead. In a few months he will be alive again on The Other Side and when he is he will forget her, because he loses the omniscience of Ascension when he returns and they won't have met yet.

Unfair to want him to mourn her. She'd wish this pain on nobody she loves.

At least Jack doesn't miss her. She's seen to that. She's made him hate her. It's a small victory, but it comforts her a little.

If he's dead now - and she thinks he must be - he hated her until the day he died.

But Daniel… Daniel will mourn her eventually. Years from now, she will vanish right before his eyes. And he will have loved - and lost - two wives.

By then - eight years from now - her world will be - in all probability - gone.

She will be gone. When Anubis comes, if not sooner.

But right now, Daniel could be here, and isn't. It feels as if he's abandoned her. She hasn't seen him again since that first night.

Every night when she goes to bed, as long as she is conscious enough to think, her last thought is to wonder: are Jack, Sammy, Teal'c, still alive? Did they die today?

She thinks they must be dead, but she is never quite sure.

Jack's 'murder' of Senator Kinsey makes the national news, though.

#

There's a television in the local bar.

It's the one nearest her bungalow. A dive by any standard. Not the sort of place Dr. Danielle Jackson ever used to go into. Yes, Dr. Jackson used to pick up strange men in bars for casual sex, but she chose better places than this. Upscale places.

And she used to go out with her friends for a casual drink sometimes, too. A steak, and a game of pool. But those were nice places.

Here there's sawdust on the floor. A haze of cigarette smoke that never quite dissipates. No top-shelf brands, and the bartender has probably never mixed a cocktail in his life. The bartop is Formica, chipped and peeling. Ceiling fans do what they can to help out the dying a/c. It isn't much.

She comes here for the noise.

It blots out her interior monologue. Helps to keep her from thinking. Anything that does that is good.

She drinks tequila, in shots. Beer for the chaser.

She never used to drink tequila.

Scotch was always her drink.

And Jack's.

He was the one who taught her about Scotch. She'd always assumed that the point of alcohol was, well, to get drunk. The legacy, she supposes, of almost a decade of college life. Going in at sixteen and burying herself in books. It was only after a few beers that it was ever actually possible to forget how much she actually disliked everybody she was around. Or something like that, anyway. Maybe she envied them. They all had homes and families. Places they belonged.

Whatever.

It was odd, since she practically lived on candy bars, but she didn't care for sweet drinks at all. Rum gave her a headache, and she didn't like bourbon. Scotch was nice. The thing she liked best about it, she decided after a while, was that you couldn't really mix it with anything. Scotch and water, scotch and soda, or scotch on the rocks. That was it. You always knew what you were drinking.

But it was expensive, and all her money went for books and course fees, so when she bought it at all, she'd bought the cheapest brands.

It was Jack who had pointed out to her - when she'd gotten back from Abydos - patiently - he was always patient about the little things - that she could afford to buy herself a decent Scotch. And that Scotch was for tasting, not for clubbing yourself into oblivion with.

He'd taught her.

She's killing him now.

And so she drinks tequila. It tastes the way she imagines gasoline would taste. Harsh and toxic. But after the third shot, she can't taste it anymore. It just burns.

At first some of the regular customers try to give her trouble. This is a rough place. Ladies of the evening make their assignations here. Some of them take their dates into the back room.

But her Spanish is colloquial. More than. It's filthy. Jack's Spanish is - was? - is? - excellent - he spent time in Central America, though he never would tell her what he did there - and she teased him into teaching her all the words and phrases that nobody would say in the hearing of a nice lady archaeologist. She uses them now. It makes them leave her alone.

And she knows they're all dead, anyway.

After a while, she's accepted as just another barroom fixture. She doesn't want trouble, anyway. She just wants to drink. Each day she comes in earlier, until she has a settled routine. Get up around noon. Arrive in the bar around three. She has a system. Beer in the afternoon. Then tequila and beer. Some nights she goes up the street for dinner. Some nights not. Then back again. More tequila, more beer, till closing.

She keeps a bottle at home, too. Just to finish out the night. And help her sleep.

And to wake up on, some mornings.

Because she's surrounded by dead people, and some days, that's a bit of a strain.

#

Everything in the bar is chipped, faded, dirty, and old, except for one. The television set mounted over the bar is shiny, new, and big. It's hooked to a satellite dish outside that's probably large enough to pick up transmissions from the Asgard homeworld if they tuned it right. It's usually broadcasting a soccer match. Or a bullfight.

Not hockey. Thank god for that.

She couldn't stand it if it was hockey.

It's all in Spanish, of course. They may technically be on American soil, but for all practical purposes this is Mexico. She doubts anyone in the bar but she speaks English at all. Or if they do, it's only barely, and certainly not as a first language. 

English was not her first language either. She has no first language. Her first memories are of everything being named and re-named in threes and fours, of shifting effortlessly across half-a-dozen languages, of knowing, almost before she knew her own name, that language was code.

Cat is _chat_ is _guttah_ is _katze_ is _gato_ is _gorbe…_

A code she could decipher at will.

Even the news is in Spanish. She ignores it. There is no news in the truth and no truth in the news. Back when she was alive, she helped to launder it herself. Earth did not need to know how close it came to annihilation by _Goa'uld_ space fleets. By rogue asteroids. By menaces seen and unseen.

The walking dead around her will not know about Anubis until he comes for them.

But then, suddenly, one night, she hears names she recognizes.

Colonel Jonathan O'Neill.

Senator Robert Kinsey.

She stares up at the television.

Jack has been arrested for the murder of Senator Kinsey.

Jack is still alive.

She drains her beer. Beckons to the bartender. A beer. Two shots. Now.

Her heart is hammering and she suddenly feels unpleasantly sober.

She should be with him. She should be with _them._

If she goes back, Jack will ask her again. And this time, she won't be able to keep from doing what Jack asks.

Telling him what he wants to know.

Even now she could tell them how he was framed for the murder. The people. The method. The reason. It isn't even a murder, she knows; Kinsey is still alive. But it isn't urgent, she tells herself. Sammy will figure it out.

Is Sammy still alive?

If Sammy isn't alive, will anyone figure it out at all?

If they don't, Jack will be executed.

He will die as a traitor.

The liquor comes. She downs both shots quickly. It doesn't help.

Nothing will help tonight.

She can't go back.

She buys a bottle from the barman and takes it back to her bungalow.

#

Over several months he watches her trying to solve a problem that - he's coming to think - has no good solution.

She's killing herself.

People die, and that is their Path. The Ascended are supposed to cultivate detachment. It is a lesson he struggles to learn.

He has watched many Daniel Jacksons die. Setting their feet firmly on paths to self-destruction that he turned away from. Or just dead in quick accidents across a thousand universes. He was always accident-prone. He'd thought of himself as unlucky, in life. In reality, he now realizes, he was a very lucky man. He survived to die in such a way that he never really died at all.

In none of his … incarnations … had he ever contemplated this slow self-murder in the name of love.

Love for a universe.

Love for a man.

Jack O'Neill.

And, of course, for Daniel Jackson.

A Daniel Jackson he has yet to be. Yet will be, he now understands. It's not that his future - for lack of a better word - is fixed. It's just that he can't change it.

It is the ultimate resolution of the question of Free Will versus Predestination, and the Ascended aren't even interested, because it's neither a question nor a paradox, just a fact, like the fact that the sky is blue (though it isn't in a lot of places.) Schrodinger's Cat is both alive and dead, eternally, no matter who's looking, well … just because.

There really isn't any way to explain it. Kind of an Ascended thing. It's not that he knows the future. He doesn't. It's more as if there isn't any future any more, just as there is no past. Just different qualities of … distance.

In the place where he is now, Time, at least in the way he used to experience it, is just another dimension, like height and width and breadth. Just as visible, just as capable of being traversed; explored. A quantum landscape, he supposes. Probably he should have paid more attention to Sam, back in the old days.

Or… not. Who, after all, does he need to explain any of this to now, or try to? All he has to do is _be._

He couldn't explain it anyway. To explain is both impossible and forbidden.

He spends what he still thinks of as his time watching the lower planes. And learning.

Watching Dani, among others.

Another iteration of Daniel Jackson.

Yes and no.

Yes, because it's true. And yes, because change one or two variables - a few chromosomes here and there; whether a coverstone falls or doesn't fall; another coverstone is buried or not - and his life becomes radically different. He's seen it. And no, because the other iterations of himself have had the decency to live and die (with the emphasis on 'die'; the lives of his alter-egos tend to be nasty, brutish, and short) wrapped up in their own little worlds, so to speak. As an Ascended Being he can see them. He could even talk to them if he wanted to break the rules. But he'll never meet them.

Not the way he's met - or, to be perfectly accurate - is going to meet - her. It's interesting to think, watching her, that the event lies in her past but in his future. And, strictly, in her future relative to the two universes; if she could simply open a door and step from one to the other, she would walk into his universe in her own past and meet herself arriving.

Probably better not.

But being flesh and not Ascended, she is a paradox. Her mind is filled with information that simply should not exist on her plane of being, because it represents too great a contradiction. She's trying to do the right thing, but the stakes are every life in the Galaxy and the people who will die first if she guesses wrong and possibly even if she doesn't are everyone she's ever loved.

Trying to find a solution to that problem is driving her mad.

They have not met yet, but he has watched her for so long that he knows her now. He's seen her past, her future. Both are … interesting.

Odd to think what a difference bodies make. That he could have loved Jack just this way if he had been her. The two of them - Dani and her Jack - have certainly made a mess of things. It couldn't have gone any differently, though, considering everything. SG-1. The military. Her past. Jack's.

It all seems so small and silly, though.

But large enough to kill her. It's what's really killing her. If she didn't love Jack the way she does, she could handle the rest of it, he thinks. Maybe find another way than this.

He doesn't wonder why she doesn't go for something quicker and more decisive than alcoholism. It's not that she's afraid of death. He knows her that well. She's actually clinging to hope. Hope that there's some way out, some way that she just can't see.

He remembers the feeling, from when he was alive.

But she isn't going to find it here, not at the bottom of a bottle. She's going to die. And she's a little too much like Jack; she'll fight the thought of Ascension to her last breath.

He can't help her that way, then.

They aren't doing her any favors back at the SGC by giving her 'space' and hoping she'll work this out and come back on her own, because she won't.

She's going to die.

He wants her to live.

Petty of him, he supposes, to find her more worthy of life than all the other echoes of himself, based on actions that someone he isn't yet will commit. Lacking the detachment that he's supposed to have already found.

That he can't manage to find.

If she's going to live, they need to come and find her.

_Jack_ needs to come and find her.

He can make that happen. It won't take much.

He hesitates.

If Jack comes, he'll take her back to the SGC. Dani knows what will happen then. Daniel knows what will happen then. She's guessed it. He's seen it - not all of it - not omniscient, remember? But the future - the time-bound one the Unascended live in - has tendencies, based on the present, whatever you conceive the present to be. You can predict it. If you're Ascended, your predictions can be pretty damned accurate.

She'll fight the future she imagines. He'll help all he can.

The future they both see won't happen at all if he leaves her here. So far her desperate gamble has worked out. Jack, Sam, Teal'c, are still alive. Earth is still here. Also a lot of other places, because - as she's guessed, and as he knows - everything is linked. Even the quantum web of universes is linked. The Ascended themselves tie the network of possible realities together.

And she will die. 

Six months from now she will come home late one night, very drunk, and drink some more - too much - and take a handful of pills - Tylenol with Codeine - that she bought over the Border the week before. She'll take them because she knows she's going to have a hangover in the morning, and sometime in the night she'll strangle to death on her own vomit. And no one will ever know - including her - whether it was suicide, or just an unhappy accident. Maybe she thought - will think - she was taking plain aspirin.

With all he can see, he doesn't know the answer to that one.

He doesn't know if he can stop her when that moment comes. Some parts of what he still thinks of as the future - the distance - are … unavailable. He knows he can't warn her now. That's one of the big no-no's among the Ascended. Telling people the future.

That is, after all, why Dani's hiding here.

Waiting to die.

Going to die.

The Ascended are supposed to cultivate detachment.

He can't.

He can't let her die.

And he can't just appear to this universe's Jack O'Neill in a vision and tell him that he has to go fetch his wandering archaeologist home. Jack would have no idea of who he is. He'd be unlikely to listen, if Daniel knows his Jack O'Neills. Which he does.

And it would be too blatant an … intervention.

Forbidden.

He'll have to think of something else…

It won't take very much.

Can she go back and still keep silent?

Maybe.

If he raises the stakes.

And that - oh, that won't take very much either. And is actually more-or-less within the scope of his Ascended mandate, as much as he has one. Almost not meddling at all. Just bringing a little peace and clarity. He's done that before. Thousands of times.

He watches her tonight as he does too often. Probably not very detached of him, but does it really count if she's someone he hasn't met yet?

She's cried herself to sleep at last. Her journal slips from her hands and falls to the floor. Blind drunk and writing in Linear A, and still managing not to blot the pages with tears. A rare, perhaps unique, certainly priceless, combination of skills. Jack won't value them as he should, of course, but no one ever values a gift with the same intent that it has in the mind of the giver.

Daniel leaves.

He has an appointment in Washington. Matters to arrange.

#

_"You're a mess," Daniel tells her affectionately._

_He's come back. Or else she's dreaming. Maybe both._

_"Couldn't tell them. Couldn't stay," she says reasonably._

_"You think this is the solution?" he asks her._

_"It's_ a _solution," she points out logically._

_"The right one?" Daniel asks._

_"The only one I had," she says. "I couldn't stay and watch him die. I can't watch Janet die, or Sammy, or the rest of them. I can't. And he'll keep asking me, Daniel. He will. And I'll tell him."_

_"It's been a year and he's still alive to tell."_

_"What does that mean? Daniel?"_

But Daniel is gone.

And there's someone pounding on her door.

In the middle of the night?

No, it's morning. Early morning. Much too early. She forces her eyes open.

She has a splitting headache. Nausea. Shakes. Too much tequila.

Last night and every night, but it helps her sleep.

The only thing that does.

She drags on a robe and staggers to the door. It isn't far.

She throws it open, wincing at the sunlight. She can't imagine who would be bothering her here. Or why.

"You're a mess," Jack says, after a moment.

#

She just stands there, staring at him, until he realizes she isn't going to move. So he moves her, comes inside, shuts the door.

She looks thoroughly hung-over.

She's living in a dive.

He knew where she was, of course. She could resign all she liked, but the SGC just doesn't let people with top security clearances walk off and vanish. They'd been keeping tabs. The fact that she'd gone and buried herself off in the ass-end of nowhere was just the icing on the cake.

It had taken him this long to prod Carter into coming up with a theory. Based on Indy's medical records, and the damned little she'd told him - and Fraiser - before she'd clammed up completely.

She'd mentioned the Furlings. She'd always thought the Furlings had built the quantum mirror.

She'd spent years - according to Fraiser - in an Alternate SGC.

They knew about two Alternate Universes. She'd visited one, bringing back the information that Apophis was going to invade Earth. He'd gone to another, when Alternate Janet and Alternate Kawalsky had come through.

Both were … close … to their own. Maybe the one she'd been in was even closer. In that case, Carter thought, it would seem to her as if she were now living in her own past.

They'd been to the past. 1969. Carter had spent the whole time lecturing all of them on how vital it was not to change anything.

Indiana had obviously taken those lectures to heart.

So now, with her head stuffed full of the knowledge of the future - at least in her opinion - she'd done the only thing she thought she could do.

She'd run away to keep from telling anybody.

He watches as she goes to the cupboard and takes down a bottle. Tequila. Pours a glass half-full and knocks it back quickly, shuddering. Sets it down.

Worse than he thought.

"What do you want, Jack?" She doesn't turn around.

Her voice is hoarser, deeper than it used to be. Raspy.

"Just to talk."

She goes over and sits down on the bed. There's only one chair.

The robe she's wearing is thin cotton and it clings.

There's coffee in the cupboard; an old-fashioned tin percolator on the stove. He rinses it in the sink, lights the stove, starts coffee. He's not sure how much sense he'll get out of her without it.

And she looks like she could use it.

"What have we got to talk about, Jack?" she asks. The sentence is flat. Hostile.

There are dark circles under her eyes. She's too thin. She's been doing too much drinking and not enough eating.

"Carter figured it out," he says.

"Not falling for that one," she tells him. Her voice is steady. She sounds sober, even though he's just seen her down several ounces of hard liquor. Probably just enough to cut the hangover.

He picks up the chair. Brings it over to the bed. Sits down facing her.

"How much of the future do you know?"

He watches as all the color drains from her face. She greys out, but doesn't quite faint, holding on to consciousness by a stubborn effort of will.

Always was too stubborn for her own damned good.

"Nobody can see the future," she manages to say. The lie is really unconvincing. She knows the future, or thinks she does.

"You'd know it if you'd already lived through it," he answers.

It's the right answer, and they both know it. She stares at him with the sick terrified expression he's seen in the eyes of people he's about to kill. But this is _Indy,_ and seeing her look at him like that makes his gut twist.

"I'm not going to ask you about it," he says gently. "I just want to know… why you're so sure."

For a long moment he's sure she's not going to answer him. But then she takes a deep breath. "The pasts," she says. "Our pasts. Were. Identical."

That explains a lot. Not similar. Identical. And if their pasts were identical, she'd have no reason to think their futures wouldn't be as well.

And she's admitted - out loud, for the first time - that she _does_ remember.

No matter what else has happened, she still trusts him that much.

But it opens up a lot of questions. How did she survive there? If the two universes were as identical as she seems to think, she must have had a double, and they know - from experience - that 48 hours is the limit for an original and a double to co-exist before the one who came from outside dies. The second Janet started having problems almost immediately.

The second Kawalsky was fine, because the original was dead.

Apparently she knows exactly what he's thinking.

"My double wasn't dead," she says. "He was male. But that was the only difference between there and here. The only one."

Male. Bizarre, but unimportant right now.

"That why you survived?" O'Neill asks. It doesn't make sense to him, but maybe it will to Carter.

"That's why I survived," she says. "That's why I was sent … there."

The coffee's ready. He gets up and fixes two cups. Sugar. There's no refrigerator, but she doesn't take milk anyway. He hands her one cup. Comes back and sits down in the chair again.

"By the Furlings," he says, continuing the conversation.

"I'm still guessing on that one," she answers, answering as easily as if they're both sitting in her office. Or his. "And I still don't know why. Or why they brought me back again. I tried to get back here, Jack. I did. They all tried to get me back. But there wasn't any way. So… I… gave up." Her voice drops to a whisper.

She stares down at the cup in her hands. Her hair falls into her eyes. Lank. Unwashed. Dull.

Gave up.

He knows her.

Really stubborn.

He wonders how long it would take her to give up, even in the face of no hope at all.

He remembers Edora.

"Indy, how old are you?"

She should be thirty-one.

She sips her coffee. Smiles at him. There's anger there, and bitterness. "Thirty-nine next July, Jack. Too old for you? What you really want to know is, 'how long was I there?' Seven years. And I arrived two years in our future. Of which I've now re-lived about a year. So the next eight years are going to be … pretty boring for me."

But her knuckles are white where she's gripping the cup, and her hands are shaking enough that her coffee's going to spill in another minute.

Whatever's coming isn't going to be boring.

Seven years.

And she'd come back and she'd lied and she'd run.

And he'd let her.

He's angry. At her. At himself.

"Dammit, Indiana-"

"They sent me back here to kill you all!"

That pulls him up short. Whether it's true or not, she obviously believes it. Enough to do this to herself.

"What?"

"To change the future! To …meddle. To try to make things come out right. And I can't. I already know that. I'll probably make things worse. Daniel said-"

She stops.

"Who's Daniel?"

She won't look at him.

She said her double was male.

Daniel. Danielle.

"Let me guess. Fellow by the name of Jackson? Might be a member of SG-1 somewhere else? Probably as much of an idiot as you can be."

She looks up. Her eyes flash. He's struck a nerve.

"If the future's so bad it's got you hiding out here, maybe we ought to change it."

"We don't have the… right."

He's back to being angry. At seeing her like this, most of all. Hopeless. Defeated. Afraid.

"Yeah, well, if we waited around for someone to give us the right, this place would still be run by the _Goa'uld_. If you don't like something, you change it. We always have."

"And make it worse? What if our only hope of surviving - of Earth surviving - is if I do nothing? The Furlings don't give free gifts, Jack. On the Other Side, they said they were coming here to give you gifts, and they never did. But they never lie. The only answer to that I can think of is that _I'm_ their gift to you. And Furling gifts destroy the receiver, unless they're paid for. They haven't given us any way to pay."

"We'll figure something out."

"What?"

"Something."

"When?"

"That's your problem."

"I've found a solution."

#

_'The right one?'_ she hears Daniel's voice in her mind.

"It's a lousy solution," Jack says. "Drinking yourself to death in this rathole."

"I'm not going back to-" she stops before she can finish the sentence. _Watch you die._

Because she won't. She can't. She'll do anything to keep that from happening.

Anything.

Use what she knows.

Change the future.

Doom them all to save him.

She knows she isn't strong enough to make any other choice.

She drains her cup. Gets to her feet. Goes over to the coffee pot, trying to ignore him as she walks past him. Jack makes Air Force coffee, and that's good; it's cutting the hangover a bit - the tequila helped too - but she still has a pounding headache, and the argument isn't helping. She pours herself another cup, heaps sugar in.

She needs to make him go away.

What will make him go away?

Why is he here, anyway? After the way she left, he hates her. Has to.

He said Sammy figured it out.

That means he knows why she ran. Forgave her that stupidity, obviously. Just like in the old days.

Damn him.

She'll have to try something else.

"You know," she says, her voice determinedly conversational, her back to him, "I'm not sure just when I fell in love with you. A long time ago, I guess. It took me a long time to realize it. I wasn't really sure until I thought you were… You _were_ dead - on Kelowna. And I was on The Other Side: I had a lot of time to think. It wasn't as if there'd ever been any hurry, really - I mean, it wasn't as if anything could ever have come of it, even if I'd figured it out and you'd been interested. I'm sorry to bring it up now. I know it's got to be embarrassing. But I think you have a right to know my reasons. Because it would be something I just couldn't-"

She stops. Jack is standing behind her. His hands are on her shoulders.

Warm hands.

He's always made her feel safe.

When he didn't infuriate her. But she understands that now. Other emotions, shielded. Cloaked. Transformed.

"'In love.'"

"I'm sorry."

She seems to have spent her whole life saying that to him. When she hasn't spent it abusing him at the top of her lungs.

"Don't be. Although… a sudden change of subject."

Either her hangover is worse than she thought or this conversation is suddenly verging on the surreal.

This isn't any of the reactions she'd ever expected from Jack O'Neill if she told him that she loved him.

Disgust. Disbelief. Mockery, oh, more than likely.

Of course, she'd never expected to tell him, either.

He's supposed to go away now.

Or at least argue with her.

"You have to see that I can't go back and see you in danger, feeling that way, and know I could stop it, and not do anything."

"I did. For years."

He can't mean what it sounds like.

They did nothing but fight.

He never said anything.

She turns around. He doesn't move away.

She looks up. He's looking down at her.

She thinks about a day. Ten - twelve - years ago for her. Five for him. He'd just been infected with the histamilitic virus from the dark side of the Land of Light. Sammy - already more thoroughly infected - had just attacked him - her idea of a seduction - in the shower room, and Dani had been commiserating with him.

_'I didn't want her,'_ Jack had said. _'I want you.'_

Oh.

Jack and Sam there.

Jack and Dani here.

"Can't," she says quietly.

He puts his arms around her. Gathers her in.

She lets him. Rests her cheek against his chest and closes her eyes. Warm. She can feel his heart beat against her cheek.

"I'm not leaving you here."

_Go away,_ she thinks, but she doesn't move.

He's here and he's alive.

He's said Sammy figured it out.

He hasn't said Sammy's dead.

He would have said.

Together they've always beaten the odds. No matter what they were. Together they've always won.

But not this time. This time the only way to win is to do nothing, let the disaster she sees coming happen, and Jack isn't good at that.

She has to make him go.

"I hung you out to dry. Don't you care? I could have told Sammy how to fix the Stargate when Anubis attacked it. I could have kept you from going to Antarctica and getting infected with the Ancient plague. I could have saved you from being tortured by Baal. Jack, I thought you were going to _die_ there. And Kinsey, the Trust-"

"Shut up, Indiana."

#

He can feel her trembling.

He's proud of her, in an odd way. Even though right now he'd like to shake her until her teeth rattle.

Certain he was going to die. Knowing - at least believing - she could stop it. Left anyway. For the good of the mission.

Even if it's a mission that only exists in her head.

He thinks of all the times over the years he's let her walk off into trouble. And worse. Knowing that one word to General Hammond would put her safely behind a desk Earthside.

She'd never have forgiven him. But she'd have been alive.

She's said she loves him. Made it sound more like a declaration of war, really. Which he supposes he ought to expect. Since apparently she doesn't think her interest would be welcome.

He'd just assumed she knew.

He couldn't say anything. Not and keep her on SG-1. Finding Skaara - and, later, keeping her safe out there - had been the most important thing.

For crying out loud. Teal'c knew. Carter had probably guessed. Why was Indiana the only one who hadn't gotten the memo?

She's been … a lot more important to him than someone under his command ever should have been. For a very long time now.

"How am I going to make you go away?" she asks despairingly.

"You aren't. No more running, Dani. You're coming back with me."

"Jack-"

"One way or another."

If he has to tie her hand and foot and carry her naked and screaming out of this firetrap, well, then that's the way it's going down.

She pushes away and looks up at him. Peering intently; she doesn't have her glasses on, and he knows that without them, the world is pretty much a blur to her. But apparently she sees enough to make up her mind. She shakes her head in resignation.

"This is a bad idea."

"So was taking you to Abydos. That worked out."

She smiles, but he sees tears glitter in her eyes.

She turns away. Picks up her coffee cup with both hands. Gulps it down as if it were medicine.

#

She's going back.

Bad idea.

No way out. She knows that tone of voice.

He loves her.

The one argument she can't figure out how to fight.

Not that he's actually presenting it as an argument.

She'd never thought that being loved back would hurt worse than not being loved at all.

The coffee burns in her stomach. Coffee and tequila. Her usual breakfast these days. Unfortunately.

"Any of this stuff yours?" Jack asks.

She supposes he's talking about the bungalow.

"My clothes."

"Get them. We're leaving."

Ah, her master's voice.

She supposes she's making a joke, but at the moment it doesn't seem like one. Or else she's too tired to have a sense of humor before noon.

#

She's lost so much weight that the clothes she brought from Colorado didn't fit any more and she's gotten rid of most of them; sold them over the Border, where American jeans fetch premium prices. She goes into the bathroom with an armful of clothes, pulls on a t-shirt - too large - adds an Indian print wrap skirt, sandals. Brushes her hair, her teeth.

Puts on her glasses. Inspects her reflection, something she hasn't bothered to do for a long time. Not a pretty sight. She's tanned dark, but despite that, her color isn't very good. She hasn't cut her hair since she left, and it's straggly. Unkempt. Could use a wash, and so could she, but there's no shower here, just the huge cast-iron bathtub that takes forever to fill, and there's never enough hot water to do it, so all she gets is a series of tepid baths. Which aren't that bad, considering the weather here, but she never really feels clean.

Her eyes look swollen and bruised. A lot of that is the tequila, of course, but then there's the fact that even the strongest over-the-counter medication really isn't up to her allergies. Half the time she's run out of it, anyway.

Well, he gets what he gets. Idiot.

Why did he come?

She takes a handful of aspirin with water from the tap. Maybe it will help, but she doubts it. At the moment she's got plenty of antihistamines, and takes a triple dose. She isn't sure whether that much will make her jittery or just sleepy, and she really doesn't care. For a fleeting moment she wishes it were cyanide, but if she'd wanted that quick and easy out there were a thousand ways she could have taken it months ago.

She's not quite sure what she _does_ want. Except for everything to stop hurting and to find the right answer.

Precious little chance of that.

She collects her few toiletries from the bathroom and throws them into her Dopp bag. Comes out and tosses it on the bed.

Drags her suitcase out from under the bed. It's still half-full of clothes - new, cheap - and her computer - she's managed to hang onto that, though she's not sure why. In the beginning, she'd done a little research, but she hasn't touched it in months. There are one or two books; sometimes she still reads. The suitcase is heavy, and it takes her a couple of tries to get it up onto the bed. She used to have more muscle tone.

Her current journal is on her bedside table. She puts that in. She has written long letters to Jack in it and in all the others, but fortunately he'll never read them. She's written them in Linear A.

Jack is standing by the door. As if he thinks she'll bolt.

If she'd thought of it, she could have tried going out the bathroom window. But that would only have prolonged things. She's too tired to fight any more.

She empties the dresser quickly, tossing things into the suitcase without folding them.

There are photos. Jack, Sammy, Teal'c, Skaara. Even one of Sha're. She took them from their frames long ago, and keeps them in a small album. She wraps it in one of her skirts, and places it carefully in the suitcase.

She has no photo of Daniel.

There are a few other keepsakes, collected along the way. She does not bother with them. She closes the suitcase. It is full.

She puts on her hat. It is straw, wide-brimmed, suitable protection against the sun. Fishes in her purse for her clip-on sunglasses, and attaches them to her glasses. The dim room goes darker, which is soothing. Slings her purse over her shoulder.

"Done."

"Where's your Jeep?"

"Parked at a gas station uptown." If she kept it here it would be trashed immediately. And she doesn't drive anywhere that often. This is a small town. She walks everywhere; to the diner where she takes her meals, to the grocery where she buys the few staples she keeps here, to the drugstore, to the Laundromat. To the bar.

Mostly to the bar.

Her voice, she notes with distant clinical interest, has developed a low seductive burr these days. It has nothing to do with seduction, and everything to do with months of drinking, untreated allergies, and too many nights spent in a smoke-filled bar. She's probably permanently damaged her vocal chords. No more singing voice, though she used to have a good one. Who cares?

"Give me your keys."

She rummages through her purse again, finds them, and walks over to hand them to him. He takes them and puts them in his pocket. Goes over to the bed. Picks up her suitcase.

She opens the door.

Even with the hat and glasses, the sunlight hits like a hammer, making her headache flare so badly she staggers and clutches at the doorframe. She steps outside anyway. It isn't even nine am and it's already hot.

Her stomach churns. For a moment she's afraid that she's going to disgrace herself completely, right here. She breathes deeply and the moment passes, but she's suddenly soaked in sweat. Her t-shirt is clinging to her and she can feel droplets of cold sick-sweat trickling down her face, her legs. She wipes her face with her hands, wipes her hands on her skirt.

His car is parked right out in front. Unmistakable government issue. She sees curtains twitch on the bungalows up and down the street. By tonight, the story will be going around that she's been taken away by the police.

Almost true.

Jack comes out carrying her suitcase. Closes the door behind him. Opens the trunk. Drops the suitcase in.

She goes back, locks the door.

She doesn't feel all that steady on her feet. What she wants more than anything else in the world right now is to go back inside and have another stiff drink. And then - oh, finish the bottle. And sleep, and pretend that none of this ever happened.

It isn't an option.

"I have to drop these off at the agency," she says, clutching the housekeys in her hand.

He nods. He's wearing his sunglasses now. She can't see his eyes. She's glad of that.

How could he possibly love what she's become?

She gives him directions.

#

They're used to people leaving on short notice, and she's giving up her security deposit and the two months' rent she's paid in advance without a fight, which helps. She's in and out of there in under fifteen minutes. Jack waits in the car, an ominous presence even in civilian clothes.

She gets back into the car.

"The gas station-"

"We'll pick it up later."

She wonders where they're going, but doesn't really want to give him the satisfaction of asking. She's concentrating, mostly, on not throwing up, but eventually, to her relief, the sharp-edged nausea passes. Caffeine, adrenaline, aspirin and antihistamines - not to mention the tequila - on an empty stomach: a bad combination at the best of times.

And this is not the best of times.

#

They get on the highway, drive for a while, and pull in at one of the big chain motels. Apparently he's already registered. They drive around to the side, park, and go inside. Jack brings her suitcase.

All the comforts of America. Gigantic beds and arctic air conditioning. She sits down on the edge of one of the beds.

She isn't really sure what to do with herself now.

Nothing new about that.

Jack checks his watch. "Breakfast?"

She shudders, swallowing hard. "Why are we here?"

"I checked in last night."

A patented Jack O'Neill non-answer if she ever heard one. She makes a face.

"I'm not taking you back to the SGC in this condition," he adds quietly.

Ranting, hysterical, and half in the bag?

Yeah, that'd make a great impression on General Hammond.

"Janet would-" she begins. Stops.

Janet is going to die.

"Probably kill us both," Jack finishes for her, as if he hasn't noticed her lapse. "So let's go eat. I'm hungry."

#

He has to bully her into every bite, but she finishes most of a plain omelet and dry toast - and more coffee - and by the time she has, she can barely keep her eyes open. He walks her back to the room, turns down the bed nearest the window, and rolls her into it when she sits down. She kicks off her sandals, pulls off her glasses, pulls a pillow over her face to shut out the light.

She's trying to pretend he isn't there. Still trying to think of a way around him. That's obvious.

They've been in this position before. A lot of times. They both know it ends up in a head-on collision. She probably wants time to think.

She's given him a lot to think about.

He closes the curtains, turns the a/c down - she hates the cold, as much as he hates the heat - and takes her glasses from her outstretched hand. Her fingers twitch reflexively, but she doesn't protest. She's already half-asleep, but not all the way there.

He puts her glasses on the nightstand, takes a chair and watches her.

He's known all along that she remembered something in between the lab on Kelowna and the Stargate. Something she wouldn't talk about. He'd hoped she'd come around. When they'd come back from offworld and he'd found out she'd resigned, he'd gone to Hammond and told him everything he knew. It wasn't much. That she'd told him that night in the Infirmary that she'd been to an Alternate SGC while she was gone. That she'd mentioned the Furlings. That she said afterward that she didn't remember any of it.

That he suspected - that he knew - that she did.

But no matter what, her loyalty wasn't in question. It was Hammond's decision to let her go anyway. To hope she'd work things through in her own mind and come back. Whatever had happened to her was obviously traumatic. Even MacKenzie agreed about that. In fact, MacKenzie had recommended an extended leave of absence for Dr. Jackson.

A year-long bender in a border town is probably not what MacKenzie had had in mind.

He remembers coming back from Iraq, from prison. It was rough. More than. When he got home, he'd climbed inside a bottle to shut the world out. Sara nearly left him then.

What happened to Indiana wherever she was?

He doesn't actually think it was anything bad.

Fraiser said she told her - after the faint, before the hysterics - that she'd gotten her ears pierced for her birthday. She'd had friends wherever she was, then, friends who could talk her into silly frivolous things. She'd been in good physical condition when they got her back. Healthy. Well-treated.

She'd gone somewhere that she'd run into enemy Jaffa. So… going through the Gate at the Alternate SGC? Or had some _Goa'uld_ invaded that Earth the way the _Goa'uld_ did in Alternate Fraiser's universe?

No. It's an old scar. If the Other SGC had just been invaded when she returned, she would have demanded they go back and help. If it had been invaded years ago, he can't see how she'd have survived.

She throws off the pillow and rolls onto her stomach, a position familiar to him from a hundred offworld bivouacs. She's deeply asleep now.

He goes outside and calls Carter on his cell.

"O'Neill. I've got her."

"Is she all right?"

"A little rocky. But she's coming back."

'A little rocky' doesn't even begin to cover it. But nobody needs to know that. Or not yet anyway.

He can almost feel Carter's relief.

"Sir, did she tell you…?"

Why she ran away and hid?

"Because you were right, Carter. Or she thinks you were."

"Has she talked about it, sir?"

"Not yet." But she will. Because Danielle Jackson is as incapable of keeping a secret as she is of lying. And what she doesn't say tells him as much as what she does.

She knows something about Fraiser that she doesn't want him to know.

Something bad.

If he really wants to know, O'Neill thinks, he can probably get the whole story out of her with nothing more sophisticated in the way of interrogation techniques than a bottle of Scotch. Maybe a bottle and a half; she's obviously built up a certain tolerance since the last time he saw her. But get her drunk enough, and she'll tell him everything.

If he's lucky, she'll even stick to English.

She'll probably even forgive him, assuming she even remembers what she'd said in the morning.

He'd never forgive himself.

If their future really is as bad as she obviously thinks it is, if it really is their future, they need to change it.

But.

He's trusted her judgment before. This theory she has about the Furlings sending her back here packed full of information that - if she uses it - will lead to their destruction is just bizarre enough to be possible.

They'd better handle this carefully.

"Sir?"

"Still here. She's got a … theory. I better let her tell you about it herself when she gets back. It's gonna be a few days."

Maybe more than a few days, depending on how much she needs to be dried out. And adding a few pounds couldn't hurt.

"Yes, sir. I'll let General Hammond know."

"I'll be in touch."

He closes the phone and goes back inside.

She's still soundly asleep.

She looks…

'Fragile' isn't exactly the word, though it's the first one that comes to mind. Not the right one, though. She's got that look he saw in Iraq, in prison. On the faces of the ones that you knew were going to survive, no matter what. Worn down to the part that absolutely would not break.

He isn't thinking about breaking in terms of giving up information. That happens. With time, and the inventiveness of the questioner, everybody talks. What breaks - or doesn't break - is the will to live. To go on breathing. To find a way.

She still has that.

She'll find a way. They'll find a way. Together.

He opens her suitcase and searches it thoroughly.

Antihistamines. Aspirin. Nothing stronger; he's grateful for that; in his experience, Indiana tends to do things thoroughly, including self-destruction, and pills would be one more thing to have to deal with, maybe something needing a call to Fraiser and he doesn't really want to go there right now.

Toiletries. Clothes. He glances through the photo album, puts it back. Books. The books are worn, battered, heavily annotated. Only one is in English.

There are several journals. Her handwriting is clear and precise, but none of it is in English. Several different languages. Several different alphabets, including some he doesn't even recognize. He can read the Spanish easily, make out most of the German, and a word or two of the French. The entries seem to be simple descriptions of where she is and what she's doing.

She was careful. He's glad of that.

He turns to the computer.

Nothing on it is password-protected, since it's no longer running any SGC software, just an ordinary word-processing program. Everything there is in English. There are a number of files; some she's written, some downloaded from the Internet. He skims them.

Dozens of files about fairy tales. He has no idea why she'd be interested in any of that. He zips them up and sends them off to Carter; the computer has a satellite uplink. Her problem.

Nothing else. Nothing personal. Nothing on her email. Either she wasn't corresponding with anyone, or she was taking reasonable care. He shuts her system down and packs it away again. Puts everything back more or less the way it was. He doubts she'll notice that anything was disturbed.

Picks up her purse.

A lot of cash, both pesos and dollars. Cancelled passport. Driver's license. Credit cards - she hasn't used them since she left. Checks for an account with an Internet-based bank. Phone; battery dead. Dead beeper. More antihistamines. Kleenex. Makeup.

Odd. He's never seen her wear any.

A ring.

He knows she's never worn rings. Never worn jewelry of any kind. Even though she came …back… with her ears pierced, she isn't wearing earrings now.

He rolls the ring between his fingers. It's a plain silver band. Like a wedding ring.

He knows she hasn't gotten married lately. But an imaginary husband can be a useful thing. He drops the ring back into her purse.

No notes. No letters. No mysterious keys or anything else to worry about.

He puts the purse back and goes out to make arrangements to get her Jeep.

It's a small risk, leaving her alone for that long. But he takes her wallet and all of her money with him. A year ago, that wouldn't even have slowed her down if she meant to run. But it isn't a year ago. He isn't sure she means to run, either. She might not even wake up. And if she does, she might not know herself what she means to do. Best to take away as many options as he can, short of tying her up.

By the time he's back - he paid someone from the hotel to ride down with him and drive the Jeep back, and the whole thing took a couple of hours - she's awake again, and has obviously been in and out of the shower. Her hair is damp, freshly-washed, and she's wearing different clothes. She's sitting in a chair in the corner, reading one of her books.

She's put on makeup.

"You were gone," she says when he comes in. "Car was gone, too."

She looked for him. And waited for him to come back. He wonders whether to put any faith in what seems like capitulation, or whether she's just biding her time. He knows she doesn't give up easily when she's made up her mind.

But at the moment he's not sure what's on her mind, and he's not quite sure she is either.

"Went to pick up your Jeep," he says.

"Driving back to Colorado is going to take a while," she says neutrally.

"I figure you could use a vacation."

"And here I thought I'd _been_ on vacation."

#

Jack gives her a faintly-amused 'don't start with me' look. After a meal, a nap, and a shower, she feels much better. Reasonably sober, and clear-headed enough to know how much trouble she's gotten herself into.

Why in god's name did she tell Jack the things she did?

Because she was scared, alone, and knew she needed help. And Jack could always help.

Maybe even this time.

Of course, telling him that she loved him didn't really have to be part of the package, did it?

Except that it did.

Soon Anubis will come to Abydos looking for the Eye of Ra. Kasuf will call for help. SG-1 will go.

Daniel had meddled there - or will; tenses fail when you've been to the future and are now living in the - or _a_ \- past - and failed to stop him. Abydos had been destroyed. Anubis had gained an unstoppable weapon that changed the balance of power in the Galaxy. Something that had let him destroy the System Lords and rule unopposed.

If she does nothing, says nothing, Anubis will gain the Eye of Ra here. He will probably still destroy Abydos. SG-1 will certainly die, because Daniel will not be here to insist to SG-1 that they trade the Eye of Ra for their freedom, to bargain with Anubis, and Jack will never consider giving it up just to save his - or his team's - life. He will die to keep it out of Anubis' hands.

If they get it at all. Daniel was the one who told them about it.

Here, SG-1 will simply go because Abydos is being attacked. The Gate Room on Abydos is always guarded. The Abydans who guard it should have time to get off a distress call to the SGC before they are stopped. General Hammond will send SG-1.

Jack will die on Abydos. Sammy and Mr. T will die with him.

Can she watch them die?

She stares into the possibility the way she would contemplate the certainty of her own death.

"You're thinking again."

Jack is standing in the middle of the room. Watching her. Assessing her the way he'd assess some new threat, offworld.

_She_ isn't the threat, but she can't tell him that. She's already told him too much.

And not enough.

She sets down her book. Walks over to him.

"I'm thinking that 'now' is the only time there is, Jack."

"What about the future?"

"Hard to be sure."

"You were sure this morning."

"I was drunk this morning. I'm sober now."

"Good. Because you aren't under my command now. You aren't even a member of the SGC. So we won't be violating any regulations."

_When did you ever worry about violating regulations, Jack?_

When they do what it is obvious they both intend to do next. At least, it is her intention, and apparently he is going to cooperate.

She closes the last of the distance between them. Puts her hands on his chest, then puts her arms around him, slipping them under his jacket. It's hot out, but he wears a jacket to hide the gun.

She's no courtesan, though she played that role once, in a _Goa'uld_ court. But she has been both married and widowed now, and the position, if not the man, is familiar. She's had practice.

And this is the man she wants.

Jack O'Neill.

Rather tall.

He puts his arms around her again.

She tilts her face up for his kiss.

She will not die - have him die - without kissing him.

#

"Worth resigning for," she suggests, after a while.

"Not worth the rest," Jack tells her firmly.

"No," she admits.

Probably not.

But what else could she have done?

#

She knows he wants her, but apparently he does not think now is a suitable time - or else he doesn't want to want her at all.

She does know what she looks like; not worth much, especially now. Jack can do - and deserves - better.

Men are supposed to be not that picky.

#

She's got the worst poker face he's ever seen in his life, but all Indiana's ever wanted to do from the first moment he laid eyes on her was explain things to people, and pokering up was no part of that job description.

She wants him to take her to bed - right now - and she doesn't understand why he won't. Unless, of course, he knows she thinks, he doesn't want her at all.

Which is not the way it is.

He does his best to explain. It's not that he doesn't think she knows her own mind. He thinks she may have given this matter some thought, and the desire to drag her former commanding officer into the sack, while perhaps ill-considered, probably isn't hasty. But even if she can't see it, he can; she's exhausted. Run-down. She should give herself a little time to rest. He isn't going anywhere without her.

He's not sure he convinces her that it's the one and not the other. But she stops looking hurt and just looks puzzled. Which is an improvement, at least.

#

She points out that it's the middle of the afternoon and she's bored. She isn't bored, actually. She just wants to see what Jack will say. She supposes he's right that she's tired. More than tired. Back in town, right about now, she'd be heading down to the bar for an evening's drinking. Then home for a nightcap and an uneasy sleep. Not very restful.

She's going to have to find some other way to amuse herself now. If amuse is exactly the word.

She asked. He said no. An end to it, then.

She is so tired of endings.

Jack has a travel chessboard with him. He gets it out and they set it up for a game. She hasn't had anyone to play against since she left the SGC.

She isn't paying attention and he wins the first game. Quickly. After that, horrified, she gets down to business. The second game is long and drawn-out. He resigns. That makes her feel better, though they were playing even and, in the past, she always had to spot him a rook.

After that he says its dinner time. She insists she isn't hungry. He insists that she is. He wins the argument, at least as far as going back to the restaurant.

#

He won't let her order her own meal. He not only orders for her, but orders her to eat. She'd forgotten just how annoying that 'cheerful bully' act of his could be. She argues and fights, but nothing works. His patience - and sadism - is apparently limitless.

She gives up.

At least he doesn't make her eat dessert.

When they get back to the room again he turns on the television. She curls up on the bed with her journal, but stares off into space instead of writing. She's eaten more at one time tonight than she has for quite some time and it makes her feel logy. Also as if she's managed to let Jack win yet another argument, and there are arguments on the horizon that she has to win, for all their sakes.

She wants a drink. She thinks of all the nights she would sit, propped up in bed with pillows, her journal on her knees, drinking until her vision blurred and writing to Jack. But there is no need to write to Jack tonight. He's here. Lying on the other bed, flipping back and forth among the channels offered by the motel - apparently not enough channels to satisfy him.

At least he doesn't want to talk.

She sits and tries to think, to plan, but imagination won't carry her over the gap of the near future.

Going back.

Watching him die.

"Thought tomorrow we'd take the Jeep. Head up to San Diego, then back East. It's good for the trip, right?" he says at last.

"I've kept up the maintenance."

She'd been planning to take it over the Border to hide.

Should have gone now, and not in a few months.

Shouldn't have stayed in Palos Verdes as long as she did. What was she waiting for? An enchanted prince to rescue her? Well here he is, and as rescues go, it isn't much of one. Because there's no rescue, no way out of this.

She is - so she's been told - one of the smartest people on the planet, and she can't think of one.

"What about your car?" she asks.

"I'll call someone to pick it up."

#

He says he wants to get an early start. They settle for the night in their separate beds to sleep, accompanied by the mutinous rumble of the air conditioner.

Or, at least, she supposes he sleeps. She lies staring at the faintly-glittering acoustic ceiling, conjugating horrors as she always has, tonight without the insulation of alcohol. One is missing from her nightly catalogue, though: tonight she knows exactly where Jack is, and that he's alive.

Everything is too sharp-edged. She holds herself tightly to keep from shaking, holding as still as she can.

"You aren't sleeping." Jack's voice comes from out of the darkness after an hour or so.

"Oh, god, Jack, why do you think I drink?" she asks wearily. And she hasn't had a drink in over fourteen hours now; since that tequila at eight o'clock this morning. She'll fall asleep tomorrow. Or the next day. From exhaustion.

"Come over here," he says.

She gets up, crosses the space between the beds, climbs into his.

They're both dressed, more or less. She's been sleeping naked lately - no air conditioning in her bungalow - but tonight she is wearing a voluminous T-shirt and her underwear to bed out of respect for Jack's modesty. He's worn a T-shirt and sweatpants.

"No funny stuff," he says warningly.

"I promise," she says.

It's actually possible to fall asleep next to Jack.

#

In the morning she has more of an appetite than she can remember having had in months, and gives him only a perfunctory fight over breakfast. They eat, check out, drive north toward San Diego in the Jeep. Jack has made arrangements for someone else to pick up the government car.

He doesn't let her drive. She doesn't put up much of a struggle. Sleeps most of the way, actually. Uneasy doze. Uneasy dreams.

They reach San Diego by mid-afternoon. She suspects he's called ahead and made arrangements, probably one of the times she was asleep; they drive directly to a hotel. Another chain. Several steps up from the previous one, though. It's got a pool.

Of course, she doesn't have anything to wear into a pool.

When he gets out of the Jeep, he moves stiffly. His bad knee has locked up on the long drive.

Going to be a problem, if he's planning to drive her cross-country, even as far as Colorado Springs.

She's not sure whether she's surprised or not to find they're once more together in a double room. He's probably afraid she'll try to run.

She hasn't anywhere to run to, though.

#

"Come and lie down," she says, once the bellman has left.

Jack regards her quizzically.

"It's not as if I have designs on your virtue," she says. She does, but he's made his lack of interest - or at least willingness - clear. "You're safe from me, I promise. So come over here."

He does as she says, groaning just a bit as he stretches out full-length on the king-sized bed. One of two.

None of them are as young as they once were. Although she is not as much younger than Jack as she once was.

She's older than Sammy now.

She sits cross-legged at right-angles to his bad leg. Scoots forward, lifting it carefully onto her knees. He startles a bit, then relaxes.

She runs her hands up his thigh, searching for the muscle knot she knows must be there. Finds it. Begins to press gently, rubbing. Feels the muscle begin to loosen. Moves down, working the tendons around the knee. She runs her palm up over his knee, then finds the place, just above it, where the long muscles attach. That will be where the worst of the pain is. She braces the leg, one hand beneath, one hand above, and begins working on the spot in earnest, pressing and stroking.

Jack groans again, this time appreciatively.

She and Daniel would do this sort of thing for each other, even before they became lovers. No one knew better than another A/T specialist the exquisite pain of muscles tortured into unnatural positions for hour upon hour while inspecting some ancient ruin. Afterward they would still do it; it was a secret illicit thrill to be able to touch each other publicly, in view of other people, and have it seem - be - something so utterly innocent.

Not really innocent.

She takes a deep breath.

"Ah, Indy? You can stop now. You'd better stop now."

She lifts her hands. Jack rolls away from her, sits up, his back to her.

"Learned a new skill."

"Old skill. I just never practiced on you before."

"Ah."

#

He calls General Hammond later, having told Indy he's going out to stretch his legs. She's settled down to take another nap. Best thing for her. If it weren't physically impossible, he'd say she hadn't slept in the entire time she's been gone.

She's too thin.

Color's better, though.

The first time he saw her - the very first time, in the Coverstone Lab - she still had a layer of puppy fat. Sweatshirts and workboots. She looked like a teenaged boy.

When he came back to Abydos a year later, she'd shed that and more. And was wrapped in several dozen yards of desert robes. And a veil. She'd been too thin, then, too. She'd told him later she was allergic to the local food. And, as he'd later found, to practically everything that grew on any world anywhere.

As a member of SG-1 she'd put on some good muscle. Strong enough to carry a full pack all day. Held an Intermediate rating in Unarmed Combat. Could lay out a man three times her size with a quarterstaff. He'd taught her to box. She'd picked it up quickly. Anything involving being able to hit back had always interested her. She'd never told him why. It wasn't hard to guess. Not after he'd seen her run her mouth a few times at anyone who got in her way - including the _Goa'uld_ \- with absolutely no sense of self-preservation.

When that damned Tok'ra had suckered them all into wearing those armbands, Indy was the one who had started the fight at O'Malley's. She'd thrown one of the guys who'd started in on Carter the length of the bar. And she'd laughed like a loon.

She always wanted to fight back.

Why not now?

He gives General Hammond a much-abbreviated version of the story he told Carter. That Dr. Jackson is exhausted and run-down and still suffering from the after-effects of whatever happened to her on Kelowna. That they'll be driving back to Colorado Springs. He's got enough leave coming that that shouldn't be a problem, if General Hammond doesn't think this is important enough to be done on SGC time.

But General Hammond okays him to take as long as he needs. They all want her back.

And he just wants her.

#

It was a lot easier to set these thoughts aside, he realizes, when it was completely impossible and she didn't know.

Because it's possible - though probably ill-advised - now. And she does know. And since she's already propositioned him once and he's refused her, she's going to let it go. It's not that she doesn't still think about it - she's made that clear - but it's up to him now. To ask her.

Or not.

'Not' is pretty unlikely. He admits that, if only to himself.

If she'd just throw herself at him or … sulk … or something, he thinks he could handle this better. But she isn't. She just asked him. _"Take me to bed, Jack?"_ And he said no.

She hasn't asked again. And he can't stop thinking about it.

He manages to hold out another night, though once again she's in bed with him. With anyone else, he'd think it was a calculated attempt at seduction. He knows the idea never crosses her mind. He said no. She accepted that. She's given up. There are some things she gives up on too easily. The idea that someone could want her is one of them.

It's her personal blindspot. He knows it the way a good commander knows all his team's weak points. It's led them into trouble more than once, offworld.

She's never realized that she was beautiful. That she _is_ beautiful, even now. Always off in a world full of books and theories and things that don't matter to him and never will. Apparently they're supposed to be more important than anything real. Her latest theory has been important enough to send her off to hide, anyway. That would qualify as fairly important. At least to her.

But for as long as he's known her, Indiana has always had bad nightmares; now they seem to be even worse. She can sleep during the day - or to be accurate - she can't quite stay awake - but if either of them is going to get any sleep at night, it's going to have to be in the same bed.

Or he can lie awake, he in his bed, she in hers, and listen to her whimper as if she's being tortured, and know she isn't even quite asleep, and wonder what's forcing her to make those sounds.

When he's watched her being tortured in reality and she's never made any sound at all.

She plays fair, though. Sticks to her own side of the bed. Pillows in between them. Perfectly chaste.

They've slept closer together offworld a hundred times.

He doesn't feel chaste.

He manages to hold out most of the next day, too.

#

She's gone shopping.

For one thing, if they were going to go on sleeping together - in this decidedly platonic fashion - she needed something with a bit more coverage than a T-shirt and panties, for Jack's sake. And something better than a few flimsy cotton wrap skirts for day.

There's a mall. She really doubts he wants to follow her around to a bunch of clothing stores, and tells him so. He agrees. They set up a time and place to meet. She goes off.

He trusts her that far, now.

There's a liquor store in the mall, and dear god, she's tempted. The knowledge of how much she _wants_ it humiliates her to the point that she has to blink back tears.

She could just go in, buy a bottle, duck out one of the mall's side entrances, and oh, be blind drunk before Jack thought to look for her. Easy enough.

Oblivion. Insulation. Abdication of responsibility.

But he's trusted her to go off shopping on her own. And she knows damned well that he knows this place is here; it was on the directory of the mall shops that they both looked at, just to begin with. Jack knows everything. This has been an article of faith in her private religion for the last fourteen years. She has never been disappointed in her expectations.

She considers matters, sitting on one of the benches, looking at the storefront. All those lovely bottles of poison.

A test?

Not Jack's style.

She's gone almost three days without a drink now. So she's absolutely sober. This would be her longest period of absolute sobriety in … almost a year. She got to Palos Verdes thirteen months ago. She's pretty sure she was drinking fairly heavily by the end of the first month. If she'd waited that long.

She has to stop. Which means _she_ has to stop. Not be stopped by somebody else.

Her decision. And he's trusting her with it.

That's what it keeps coming back to.

Trust.

She's given him precious little reason to trust her, with one thing and another, but apparently he still does.

She gets up off the bench and heads in the direction of the first clothing store.

She doesn't look back.

#

She has to try everything on. Her sizes have changed.

She buys sneakers.

Earrings.

Jeans.

Two pair of sensible non-threatening cotton broadcloth pajamas, one size too big for good measure.

But then she sees - and can't resist - the nightgown.

White cotton voile so sheer it's nearly transparent. The top is only opaque because of the smocking. There's a peignoir that goes with it, trimmed in hand-tatted lace. The two items together, trousseau for a vampire bride, cost as much as all of her other purchases put together.

She buys them anyway. God knows why.

#

"What'd you buy?" Jack wants to know when she gets back to their meeting place.. She's late. That's nothing new.

"Clothes."

_Dreams._

#

Back at the hotel, she unpacks, and realizes that she should have bought another suitcase, too, because the one she has is already full. Well, she can dump some of that stuff to make room for this. Or leave what she's bought in the bags.

"We leaving tomorrow?" she asks.

"In a hurry?"

"I don't know."

Better than being cooped up in a hotel room with a man she wants and can't touch.

A sudden graphic fantasy makes her shudder.

She wants him.

She is - she has become - no stranger to the conjugal bed; tenderness; shared bodies. Not recreational sex, abbreviated release, but skin on skin, touching and caring. She hungers for it as much - more - than she yearns for the poisonous oblivion of alcohol. It is what she missed most of all, in the sudden sharp surgery of her widowhood. The thing she had been taught to need. Learned to need. Someone to hold her, to touch her, to tell her she is worthy of love.

Someone to love.

"What's this?"

He's found the box with the fancy lingerie. A Jack O'Neill left unwatched is the devil's plaything.

"It's a peignoir set, Jack. Don't worry, I'm not planning to wear it."

_Then why did you buy it?_

She takes a deep breath, willing distance, calm, abstraction.

Maybe a cold shower.

He takes the nightgown out of the tissue and holds it up. The material is nearly transparent in the strong afternoon sunlight coming in through the window. They're on a high floor. There's nothing to block the light.

"You wouldn't be wearing it long," he says consideringly.

She laughs. "Thanks for the vote of confidence." She reaches out to take the nightgown away. She'll pack the pieces up, saved for some unlikely future occasion. She's not sure she can actually imagine wearing them for Jack, and can imagine wearing them for no one else.

Their hands touch.

It's nothing she was expecting, or intending. She was going to abide by his rules. He would not let her have him, and that was his choice. Certainly the man knows what he wants and what he doesn't want. He doesn't want her, and that's his decision.

But he drops the nightgown on the bed, slides his hand up her arm, and gathers her in.

And this time, what he starts, what they start, he doesn't stop.

#

For just an instant, as his body slides over hers, she thinks of Hathor.

Hathor and Jack.

And what came after.

But before the horror of the memory can claim her completely it is gone, swept away by the reality of where she is now, as a breeze, conjured up from somewhere, passes over her skin. She presses her body against his, turns her face up to his. To kiss.

To be kissed.

#

It occurs to her, afterward, that she's wasted good money on two pairs of pajamas that she's probably never going to wear.

Although the peignoir set, worn or not, seems to have been a good investment.

They spend a second day in San Diego before moving on.

#

Whether she's currently a member of the SGC or not, the two of them have blown the spirit, if not the letter, of the Fraternization Regulations to hell in a handbasket, and he knows it if she doesn't.

Because she's coming back.

And even if nothing like this ever happens again, things can't go back to being the way they were.

He doesn't really want them to.

If he had, he could have stopped things before the first kiss.

Never put his hands on her back in her bungalow.

Never admitted that he loves her.

She'll probably claim entrapment. Especially when she realizes that this means she can't come back to SG-1.

Which is hardly reasonable, considering how hard she'd kicked about being dragged back to the SGC at all.

Still.

Burn that bridge when they come to it.

Cheyenne Mountain is still days away.

#

They head east by slow stages.

She knows they're going slow for her benefit, but she's selfish and greedy enough to take what's offered. Happiness. Peace. She hasn't been happy since the moment she realized she was standing on the steps of Kelowna's Stargate. What she did then was automatic. So many times in the months since she's wondered if the right thing to do would have been nothing at all. Let the fire take them all.

But then the Furlings would have come, and General Hammond would have taken their gifts. Instead she is here, and the Furlings have not come.

_She_ is the Furlings' gift, and she can be given or not as she chooses.

She wakes in the night - she does sleep, but never straight through - listening to Jack breathe, trying to decide what the right answer is. She can't. She knows what Daniel said. _Change nothing._

But she cannot let Jack die. Or Janet. Or Skaara.

She tried.

It nearly killed her.

She doesn't think Daniel thought that was the right answer, either.

So what is?

Daniel won't tell her. She knows he can't.

She is in love. She is loved. It ought to feel like a betrayal of her marriage. Her husband. Daniel. Is that why it took her so long on The Other Side to realize she loved Daniel, even though she barely understood, there, that she loved Jack at all?

But love is not exclusive, not singular. Nor does it end. She loves them both, though it feels, internally, as if she is engaged in some weird metaphysical polyandry: she has not given Daniel up, in any sense, nor is he dead, though he is lost to her - and his bereavement, as their first meeting, still lie in his future.

She is going to have to explain - something - about Daniel to Jack, eventually, although she's not quite sure what, or how. But she knows about Sara, and fair is fair.

She hopes she can get through the explanation that there was someone for her on The Other Side without telling Jack it was her quantum double. She knows Other Sam suspected - knew, in the end - and found the whole idea perverse. She's afraid Jack's reaction will be worse.

#

She eats, sleeps. Makes love. Starts at last to put on a little weight. Jack finally lets her do some of the driving, but it tires her quickly.

They play chess.

The questions she half expects don't come. He does not even ask her about the nightmares, though they'd make an obvious starting place for questions. She still has them, though they're neither as bad nor as frequent now. Bad enough to jerk her straight out of the depths of sleep, though, when they come. Reaching for something. Usually a gun. Sometimes - and those are the worst - trying to activate the self-destruct for The Mountain. She is not one of the people who can.

From the way she misses it, she was drinking much more heavily than she suspected. Or let herself think. Stopping is rough, even though she has committed herself to it. Not DTs rough, fortunately. But she misses the crutch of easy oblivion that keeps her from thinking. Because now her mind is working all the time, except when Jack stops it for her.

He will die. They will all die. But there will be these memories to take with them into the long cold dark of oblivion.

#

They won't let her back on SG-1 if she's sleeping with Jack.

She knows he knows it.

She doesn't want to stop sleeping with Jack. Ever, actually, though forever will be shorter than it is popularly supposed to be.

They probably, she decides tentatively, wouldn't let her back on SG-1 because she _has_ slept with Jack, even if she stopped. She isn't sure. It's not as if the two of them have to tell anyone. Although Jack can be a stubborn stickler for regulations at the oddest times. The spirit might move him to confess.

Might as well have plenty to confess, then.

It's been a week since he came to her bungalow. She has stopped living in the future. There is now, and now is the only place she wants to be.

The future won't leave her alone, though.

What does she do about Abydos, about Anubis?

The Eye of Ra.

Daniel and Jonas eventually destroyed the completed weapon in The Other Reality, when Anubis went to Kelowna looking for information on _naquaadriah_ technology. But Daniel isn't here, Jonas is dead, and Kelowna has been destroyed.

Their two universes are different by that much.

Is it a difference she can use? Should use?

Is there actually a way out?

"Go back to sleep," Jack tells her.

"Can't," she says.

Not this time.

There's no _naquaadriah_ in this reality. At least, that they've discovered yet. It was only found on Kelowna; it can be artificially-created by bombarding _naquaadah_ with radiation somehow, but the process is incredibly dangerous; that's all she knows about it. Anubis doesn't have it, and neither do they.

Another difference.

Enough?

Anubis used it to build and power a class of super- _ha'tak_ to consolidate his dominion over the System Lords.

Another difference. Enough of one?

"I have to go with you, Jack. I know I can't still be on SG-1, but I have to go with you when you go."

To Abydos, she's thinking.

He sighs. Sits up. Turns on the light.

"It's four o'clock in the morning."

"Las Vegas is a twenty-four hour town," she offers.

She's sorry to wake him, though they should both be used to it by now. Maybe she'll go down to the casino so he can get some sleep. He knows, now, that she won't run away.

They're staying at the Luxor. She'd insisted. Even though he'd pointed out it reminded him of far too many _Goa'uld_ dungeons they'd all been in, she couldn't resist. All that fake Egyptian decor. She's bought souvenir t-shirts. For herself, for Sammy, for Mr. T, for Janet.

She cried over that later, hiding in the shower. Souvenirs for dead people. She hadn't wanted Jack to know, but sometimes it's still too much for her.

She knows what it will be like when Anubis takes Earth. She's been to the reality where Apophis does, and Anubis's attack will probably be similar. Las Vegas isn't a primary target, but San Francisco is. The earthquakes triggered there will cause damage even this far East. The Ogallala Aquifer will collapse, and thousands of acres of desert will subside, taking out all of Clark County. And, of course, Area 51 is close enough that if it is hit with something large enough, Las Vegas could suffer collateral damage.

So all this bright pagan fairyland is doomed.

In four years or so.

"And… where is SG-1 going? Because it would be helpful to have a Gate address. That sort of thing."

"I…" She stops.

If they go to Abydos now, get the Eye and destroy it - and let Anubis know that they have - perhaps he'll leave Abydos alone. They could give it to the Asgard. Or to Anubis' worst enemy. To Baal. Or to Yu.

It might stop him. Slow him down.

Give them time.

With enough time, maybe they could think of a way out.

She sighs, frustrated. She doesn't know what to do. She has been sent here by the Furlings. She is a gift. Furling gifts lead to destruction.

Without intervention that will not, cannot come, her universe will end.

"Okay," Jack says. "You're _definitely_ off SG-1. And we're going … somewhere. And you won't tell me where. So let's get married."

"What?" His words wrench her out of the endless futile circle of her thoughts.

It's hardly anything she was expecting him to say.

She doesn't know what she was expecting.

This has been an enchanted time, a time out of time, but like all such times, it will end. Jack will go back to being Colonel Jack O'Neill, SG-1.

She will become…

She doesn't know what. But not this. Not Jack's lover in the dark.

If she has thought about it at all, she has simply assumed that it would end. Somehow. Awkwardly. Gracefully.

She hasn't thought about it, actually. Because she hasn't wanted to think about it ending.

Hasn't wanted to think about the fact that she can think of no solutions.

Only endings.

"Married. It's that thing that two people do who, you know, want to do… this. Legally."

"Don't you have to ask someone?"

She grasps at forms and details.

"I just did."

"I mean… permission?"

The military insists on permission for everything.

The two of them haven't asked permission for this.

"Easier to get forgiveness. Less paperwork. So?"

He's asked her to marry him. Jack wouldn't joke about something like that.

To marry.

Oh, god.

She's been obsessing about the future for the past year and this is one future she'd never imagined.

#

She takes his hand and holds it tightly.

"Jack… I think you should know… It might make a difference to you… I was … married." 

Her voice is shaking.

Couldn't be here. Has to have been there.

It doesn't really come as a shock. Or, now that he thinks about it, much of a surprise.

He knows about her past. Crazy alien princes and one-night stands both. He even knows about the boyfriend from Chicago, the one who became host to Osirus. Not because she's told him. Because she was vetted to work at the SGC, and he's read the file.

But that's different. All of that is different from sharing a bed in all the other ways. Not for sex, but for sleeping and waking up and just being together. It's all the things it takes time to figure out. Time spent sharing a bed with someone you love. They haven't had enough time yet to learn it together, but - apparently - they've both been married before.

Which explains a lot.

Of course, after five years on SG-1, they know each other a lot better than a lot of married couples. Have slept together, though, granted, not like this. He already knows she's worthless before her second cup of coffee and irritable for hours afterward. A packrat. Messy and disorganized. Never on time. She knows he's an early riser. How he takes his coffee. How he likes his steak. That his knees are pretty well shot and his back is going, and, that he's well, not very domestic.

Truthful girl. Playing fair. Getting all the confessions out of the way up front before she's trapped him.

Married.

He thinks about what that means for a moment.

Widowed - in every way that matters - by coming back here. From the moment she was standing in the Gate Room, looking as if it were the last place on Earth she'd expected - or, actually, wanted - to see. She'd lost a home. A family. Not children, he's pretty sure, at least she has that much to be thankful for. Though he doubts, considering how he found her, that she spent much of the last year counting blessings.

She lost more than any of them realized. And none of them had had a single clue.

He thinks of the ring he found in her purse. Not an imaginary husband after all. Something bought to remember a real one by. He's going to have to revise his opinion of her ability to lie. She's actually pretty good at concealing the truth.

"Someone I know?" he asks.

Because it would be just weird if she'd married …him… over there and she never said anything.

"No."

"So you and me - there…?"

"Jack, over there you've got the world's biggest thing for Sammy. And the other way around."

That's so unbelievable it actually manages to distract him.

"Me and _Carter?"_

She nods. Looks pretty amused by it, too, just for a moment.

"It's against regulations."

_Carter?_

"They're not doing any more about it than we were."

"We're getting married," he points out.

And she's just told him that he and Carter - there - are still alive, seven, no, eight, years in the future.

"Okay," she says.

She's said yes.

#

"So," Jack says. "This guy. Civilian?"

"SGC," she says before she thinks. Not quite a civilian.

But she told Jack he doesn't know the man she married. And Jack knows everyone - practically - at the SGC.

Certainly everyone she'd be likely to marry.

She's so bad at lying.

She should have known she'd have to tell him everything. She takes a deep breath. Closes her eyes.

"I married Daniel Jackson," she says very quietly.

#

It takes him a moment to understand what she's telling him.

She married her double. The 'her' that was male. Her … twin.

For a moment he thinks it might be a joke, but he can tell from her face that it isn't. It's her 'confessional' look, the one she gets when she's saying things she's sure people aren't going to like, but that have to be said anyway.

He remembers her passing out in the Gate Room just after they'd all come back from Kelowna.

How hard she'd cried, later, in the Infirmary.

Not just fear, then.

Grief.

Fraiser had liked _her_ double. They'd become close friends in a matter of hours.

He supposes Indy'd liked her double, too. More than liked.

And she'd known him for seven years.

Her mirror image.

Maybe the only person who could really understand her.

Assuming, of course, anybody ever wanted to be understood that well.

Apparently she had.

Standing in the Gate Room. Realizing she'd just become a widow. Convinced she didn't dare tell them where she'd been, or what had happened there.

She hadn't quite managed it. But she'd covered up more than they'd thought.

He glances at the clock. Coming on for five now. General Hammond's going to have a great morning when the news O'Neill still plans to provide hits his desk.

He uses the hand she's got in a death-grip to draw Dani in close to his side. Disentangles it to put an arm around her instead. Her muscles are rigid with tension.

"How long were you married?" he asks.

"A year and a half. But we'd been …dating… for a while." She laughs despairingly. "Oh, god, I should have just told you this back in Palos Verdes. You would have left me there."

He pats her shoulder. "Pretty low opinion you've got of somebody you've just agreed to marry."

Her eyes open; he's surprised her. She looks up at him. "But I just-"

"Said you met someone and fell in love, a long way from here. And lost him. And I asked you to marry me. And you said yes. Anything else?"

She shakes her head. He feels her relax. "When did you want to get married, Jack?"

"Now is good."

#

It occurs to her, as they leave their room in search of the nearest wedding chapel, that she married Daniel in Las Vegas too, and for exactly the same reason: speed and legality were more important than anything else.

They could remarry on Abydos.

Jack will be Skaara's brother now. Skaara will like that.

Skaara will die unless she saves Abydos.

And so will Jack.

#

There's a wedding chapel in the Luxor.

And Jonathan and Danielle get married.

The officiant warns them several times that the marriage is legal and binding. They certainly look as if they aren't taking it seriously. She's wearing a Luxor t-shirt with a gold glitter Pharaoh head on it, several layers of bright cotton gauze skirts, and her Mexican sandals. Jack is wearing slacks and a sports shirt. And a baseball cap. His sunglasses are slung around his neck, because the lighting in the casinos and on the Strip is so bizarre that you end up needing them at all hours, day and night.

They look like tourists.

But they are legally bound in marriage, with the paperwork to prove it, and afterward, they go to breakfast.

She allows herself to wonder - now that the matter is irrevocably settled - whether there was something tactical as well as romantic about Jack's decision. It seemed impulsive, but Jack often seems impulsive, and rarely is. Without self-flattery, she can imagine that the idea of marrying her was in the back of his mind - or even the front of it - before he left Cheyenne Mountain in search of her. That's the sort of man he is. Deliberately impulsive.

She, on the other hand, is never quite sure what she's going to do next half the time, but somehow it seems to work out.

Usually.

So… married her. Why, besides love? The only thing she can think of is protection, which has been Jack's mandate from Day One.

"So what does the NID want with me?" she asks, after the waitress has left their orders.

Jack still doesn't trust her to order her own meals, apparently on the theory she won't order at all. Set before her is a plate of bacon, waffles, and scrambled eggs. This morning she thinks she may be able to finish it all.

Jack chokes on his coffee. "What the _hell-?"_

"Playing a hunch," she says. "Right or not?"

"Right," he says, after a long pause. "They finally noticed you weren't working for us, and decided in that case, you ought to be working for them. Wanted Hammond to tell them where you were. Got a little… insistent. Figured I should get to you first."

It explains, at last, the timing. Why he came for her when he did. There was a shakeup at the Trust/NID, leading to the whole attempt to frame Jack and discredit the SGC. It didn't work. They retrenched, reset their sights, came after her. And so did Jack.

"But I _am_ coming back to work for General Hammond. And just in case they manage to block that, you can tell them to keep their damned hands off your wife."

"That's not why I married you," he says quietly.

He's studying her face. She can tell it's true, and that he's not sure she's going to believe him. But she does. If it had just been about keeping her out of the hands of the NID, there were a hundred other ways. More honest.

Jack would lie to her, and has. But he would not lie to her in this way. He would not offer up his body in marriage.

She nods, agreeing.

"I know. But it will make a good way to get the NID to back off."

He grins at her, relieved. "True." There's a pause. "Carter is going to kill us both."

She thinks about it. "Yeah."

#

"Dr. Jackson, are you telling me that your report was … 'incomplete?'"

"Yes, General."

She has been married a week. She's back at the SGC. Back in uniform. Here to take her caning.

Jack, Sammy, and Teal'c are here. It's her, General Hammond, and SG-1. She wonders where their fourth is. It's been a year. They should have one. On The Other Side, it was Jonas Quinn until Daniel returned from the dead. Who is it here?

It has to be someone. Doesn't it?

She's already seen Janet, who wasn't in the least pleased with her. Both for running away without a word, and for the condition she's come back in.

Janet would have been a lot less happy with her if she'd seen her two weeks ago, Dani thinks. But as it is, she's been severely scolded and given a diet list and an exercise regime. Both of which, she is told, she had better follow.

Both of which look exhausting.

She is, however, greatly relieved to be back on her regular antihistamine shots again, though the vitamin cocktail that Janet has served up as a chaser has not only left a huge bruise on her hip - she thinks that may have been deliberate - but left her feeling faintly spacey. Her mouth tastes metallic. Janet says these are normal side-effects and will fade after an hour or so. Her head is clear enough for the debriefing, however, and that's good.

Jack has already gotten his lumps from General Hammond in private. So far - in theory - General Hammond is the only one who knows about the wedding. She hasn't even told Sammy, and she knows she's going to pay for that.

Sitting at the conference table, she explains about the Furlings, and Furling gifts. About Kelowna. She's spent the last week - as they drove from Las Vegas to Colorado Springs - putting together the report she intended to present. Even Jack doesn't know all the details. He didn't press for them.

"—the Furlings placed me in an alternate universe essentially identical to our own at a point two years after Kelowna. I spent seven years there. And then they sent me back here - this is my assumption - to the same moment they took me from. I have no reason to believe that the events in our two universes don't… Almost everything up to this point has matched."

Jack has told her what has happened at the SGC since she's been gone. Or, rather, she told him, and he confirmed it.

"And you say the Furlings told you that they intended to come here? And present us with … gifts?" General Hammond says skeptically.

She knows he isn't happy with her. How unhappy, she isn't sure yet.

"Yes, sir." _And I tried to get back here and stop them. And I couldn't._ "And from everything I've been able to discover in my researches … there … it is absolutely vital that Furling gifts be paid for, or else the consequences are, well, disastrous. And we have no way of paying for them."

"But the Furlings never showed up here," Sammy says.

"No," Dani says. "They sent me. With knowledge of the future - or what amounts to it. I think I'm their gift to you."

_Nothing else makes sense._

"Which," Jack says, "you don't think we're supposed to unwrap."

"And so you concealed your knowledge and fled from us," Teal'c says.

She sighs. "I'm… sorry. I think - I still think - that they mean me to use what I know to manipulate our future, because I'm sure - I'm fairly sure - that the events in our two universes will play out the same way. They have so far. And I'm afraid that if I do - if I try - things here will come out … worse."

"Or better," Jack points out.

"It's…" she begins. There they only survived the Replicator attack at Dakara because Daniel was an Ascended Being. _I'm not Daniel. I'm not an Ascended Being and I never will be. We won't survive it._ She shakes her head. "I don't know what to do," she says.

"Such indecision is unlike you, Danielle Jackson," Teal'c points out.

Rya'c will die. Master Bra'tac will die. In a few months they will be trapped in a Jaffa death camp and worked to death. Eventually Teal'c will hear of their deaths. He will know she could have saved them.

Daniel helps him save them, on The Other Side.

She is not Daniel.

Teal'c will never forgive her.

"Let me tell you something else I learned on The Other Side," she says.

She tells them about Kheb. About the Ascended.

"I've spoken to… one of the Ascended. The knowledge the Furlings have given me by sending me to the alternate universe and then bringing me back here is similar, in a way, I think, to what the Ascended normally possess. And the Ascended don't use their knowledge to interfere in the lives of the … Unascended, because even they - and they know a lot more than I do - don't have enough wisdom to use what they know. So how could I?"

_"Daniel_ told you not to meddle?" Jack demands incredulously. _"Daniel_ is one of these 'Ascended' guys?"

She stares at him, nonplussed. He shrugs. "You told me," he says.

She nods, reluctantly. She might have. And Jack is good at putting the pieces together. "He was Ascended. He came back later. But… while he was Ascended, he could travel between universes. So he came here. And we talked."

She doesn't want to say that he is still Ascended. She doesn't want it to occur to them - to Jack - that Daniel could be watching them now.

"Oh, that's just peachy," Jack says, sounding disgusted.

"Who's 'Daniel?'" Sammy wants to know.

She sighs. She's known it would all come out eventually. "My quantum double."

Sammy's eyes light up. "Your quantum double in the universe you went to was _male?_ But… you said you went into the future there, Dani. If he was already Ascended, how could you have ever met him?"

"He died on Kelowna, the way I would have if the Furlings hadn't intervened. But he saved his SG-1 by defusing the Kelownans' _naquaadriah_ device, so Kelowna and the rest of SG-1 survived. A year later he came back to life, so he was alive when I arrived."

"But he still knew who you were when he came here, even though he hadn't met you yet?" Now Sammy just sounds confused.

"The Ascended have a kind of … limited omniscience … as far as I can tell. But he didn't remember any of his experience as an Ascended Being after he'd … descended."

_Will descend,_ she amends, mentally and pedantically. That event still lies in his future. It follows the destruction of Abydos. So Daniel is still among the Ascended. Capable - unless he is elsewhere on the mysterious business of the Ascended - of being here now, invisible, to watch her hopelessly complicate her life.

"Useful," Jack mutters.

"The point is-" she says.

"The point is," Jack interrupts, "that you've got to make up your own mind. Maybe he isn't right. Seems to me there are a few differences between there and here."

She looks at him, wondering.

Enough?

Why did the Furlings send her back here?

To destroy the universe?

Surely they could do that themselves, if they wanted to.

Daniel said she'd figure it out.

If she figures it out, what will happen?

Will she be taken away again?

Where will she be sent this time?

A third universe?

"Dr. Jackson," General Hammond says. "This is all a bit much to take in all at once. But what I do understand is that you have willfully concealed information that may be of vital strategic importance to this Command, no matter what reason you may have had for doing so."

When he puts it that way, it does not sound good. But she can't think of what else she could have done. And still can't.

She stares down at her hands.

"And you've given me no choice but to confine you to this Base until further notice."

#

O'Neill sees her head snap up and her mouth drop open as she stares at General Hammond. She manages not to say anything, though. Some sense of self-preservation left. O'Neill suspects that the more the General thinks about what Dani's told him, the less he's going to like it.

He admits that it comes as a bit of a shock to him, too - both her full report, and what the General has done about it. Going to put a little crimp in the honeymoon when his wife is confined to on-Base quarters.

"Dr. Jackson?" General Hammond prompts.

"Yes, sir." She lowers her head again.

"Very good. That will be all for now. Dismissed."

The General gets up. They all - even Dani - get to their feet. He walks to the door. Stops and turns back.

"Oh, and Colonel O'Neill? Dr. Jackson? Congratulations."

"Thank you, sir," O'Neill says. "From both of us."

The General leaves. Dani flops back down into her seat. Right now she doesn't really have any place to go to on Base. She doesn't have an office any more, and they just arrived a few hours ago.

"Colonel?" Carter asks, puzzled.

Dani folds her arms on the table and rests her forehead on them, apparently intending to pretend the rest of the world isn't there. He goes over and puts a hand under her arm, hauling her to her feet. Time to face the music.

"Carter, I would like to introduce you to my wife."

"Oh my god," Carter says. "I mean, congratulations, sir."

He thinks the first reaction was more genuine.

"Thank you, Carter."

"I, too, wish to offer my congratulations. And wish you both _ral tor ke,"_ Teal'c says.

"We'll need it," Dani tells him, apparently deciding that silence is not an option. "Sorry, Sammy," she adds.

"You're going to be," Carter tells her. "When did you-? Where did you-?"

"About a week ago. In Las Vegas," she tells Carter.

"And now General Hammond has you locked up here. Serves you right."

He always knew Carter had a vicious streak.

The four of them leave the Conference Room together.

#

Jack has gone off to arrange for her on-base quarters, taking Mr. T with him.

She wonders if General Hammond will _ever_ let her off The Mountain again. Of course, if the NID is still after her, she's probably safer here.

Still….

She's alone with Sammy in Sammy's lab. It feels both homelike and strange.

Sammy is staring at her as if she's become a new piece of alien technology.

_"Married!_ To the Colonel! Dani, I don't believe it!"

"He asked me. I said yes."

"And you couldn't wait till you got back here? So your friends could be there?"

"Easier to get forgiveness than permission."

Since forgiveness may not be forthcoming, and they might not have gotten permission at all. Not now that she's … back.

"Dani… you know General Hammond isn't going to let you back on SG-1 now."

She looks down, and realizes, with faint mortification, that she's blushing. Married or not, she wouldn't have been able to rejoin SG-1 anyway. Because she and Jack were lovers.

_Are_ lovers.

Are _married._

_"Oh,"_ Sammy says, in a faintly strangled voice of realization.

Dani giggles despite herself. She has missed her _Tau'ri_ sister.

"So you," Sammy says. "And Colonel O'Neill."

"Well not before I resigned," she says indignantly.

It wouldn't have been right.

Jack hadn't even given her a clue.

All those years.

More years than Sammy knows.

Sammy smiles and pats her arm. "All those years I was sure the two of you were going to kill each other."

Dani shrugs, thinking of all the years she spent desperately trying to get home to Jack. And the moment she stopped, because a new place had become truly home at last, the Furlings tore her from it and flung her back here, confronting her with choices no one should ever have to face.

She blinks hard.

Polyandry. Not divorced, not precisely widowed. In love with two men at the same time. But only one of them is here.

Sammy is talking.

"Dani, I'm still trying to, well, just come to terms with what you said back there in the meeting. You can't think you know the future. It's not possible."

"It's not my future, Sammy. It's my past. It's already happened."

"It's not our future either, Dani. It's another universe's future. We already know there are variables between the two. There, Kelowna survives. You're male. And - apparently - intermittently dead. So-"

"Sammy, that's the point."

Sammy stops. Looks at her.

"Believe me when I tell you that the variables make a difference. But I don't know how much. The Ascended aren't bound by time and space, but I am."

Sammy studies her face.

"You're not telling me that we're all going to be just fine, are you?" Sammy says slowly.

No. They're all going to die. Horribly. Because of the variables.

And even if she tells them everything, she doesn't know if she can stop it.

"Sammy, if you could save a hundred people you loved at the price of killing a billion strangers, what would you do?"

"Oh, Dani." Sammy puts her arms around her and hugs her tightly. "Nobody's asking you to make that kind of choice."

"The Furlings are."

"You don't know that. It's just a theory of yours. Test it."

"How?"

"Tell us something. _Change_ something."

She looks at Sammy, hoping.

Sammy is so smart. Maybe Sammy's right.

"Dani, _please."_

Sammy said that a year ago. _'Dani, please.'_ And she'd said nothing.

It's no different now.

But the universes aren't the same. Maybe if she changes just a few things, just a little.

She _had_ a solution. Daniel didn't seem to like it.

If it was Daniel, and not a dream.

She's here. She's married. Jack won't let her run again. Neither will General Hammond. She's told too much. And the NID is after her now. If she does get out of The Mountain, they'll grab her. And they won't be nearly as gentle in asking questions as her friends have been.

They'll figure out there are questions to ask.

"Dani, trust us. What if you're wrong?"

She _wants_ to be wrong. She _does._

The Furlings, like their fairy counterparts, are eternally laying traps.

What if not using what she knows is the trap?

A test.

A small change.

It has to be something small.

What?

The Eye of Ra?

Too big. It will change too much.

Janet?

Too far away; a year and more in the future.

Rya'c? Bra'tac?

She needs something small, harmless, and soon.

Something that won't make a real difference.

What?

She takes a deep breath.

"Harry Maybourne is going to come to Jack with something he describes as a key to a vast cache of _Goa'uld_ technology. It isn't. He thinks it's a key to a portal to an offworld paradise. What he doesn't know is that the paradise was compromised centuries ago by the _Goa'uld_ , and is now overgrown with a plant that causes paranoid delusions, and all the original inhabitants are dead. It's on the moon of the planet he'll want to take you to, by the way, but there's nothing there worth having."

She feels dizzy with confession.

Sammy looks at her. "Are you sure?"

"It was true there. It should happen here."

"Colonel," Sammy says, looking up.

Dani's back is to the door, but it's obvious Jack has just come in.

"Dani's just given us a future event we can check."

"And… good work with the hot pincers, Major."

She keeps her back to him. She isn't sure whether she's done the right thing or not. She isn't sure whether Jack is pleased that she told Sammy, or hurt that she told Sammy instead of him. Having told anyone anything has left her feeling disoriented, faintly giddy.

Maybe Janet slipped her truth serum instead of vitamins.

"You'll be receiving a visit from Colonel Maybourne, Colonel," Sammy says, in her most neutral voice.

Jack's silence is eloquent.

#

He conducts her to where she'll be living. Possibly for the rest of her life, she thinks mordantly. Isolation Quarters: bedroom, bathroom, sitting room. There's even a tiny - very tiny - kitchenette: hot plate, microwave, refrigerator, sink. You could lock someone in here permanently and they'd survive as long as they had food. Hence the name.

He's a little distant. Well, he's on-duty. She hopes that will change when he's off duty.

She wants things to be between them like they were before they came back to The Mountain, and wonders if that is possible here. There are so many memories here of being two other people.

Are they supposed to become those people again?

She can't.

The Isolation Quarters have mikes and cameras in every room, designed to be monitored from Medical.

Her suitcase and shopping bags are here.

Peachy.

"All the comforts of home," he says.

This is her home now.

"Twenty-four hour audio and video," she answers.

"Yeah, well, I got Fraiser to shut that down. You're under arrest - kind of - not under observation."

She looks up. The power light on the nearest camera is indeed dark.

This will make any proposed conjugal visits a lot less embarrassing.

But he has a real home to go to. One she'd expected to be taken to, before today.

"'Maybourne?'" Jack says, aggrieved.

Not angry with her, apparently. Entirely fixed on what she's told Sammy. That's familiar. She relaxes a little.

"He's going to come offering you a way in to a _Goa'uld_ weapons cache. His story is that he has to go along to get you in, and he wants a full pardon in exchange. It's all a lie, start to finish."

"Well, that's Harry. No weapons?"

She shakes her head. "Former alien paradise, destroyed by the _Goa'uld_ , in which your counterpart was marooned for a month. Which wouldn't suit me."

"Selfish of you," Jack says.

He sounds amused.

She's shaking inside.

Can this future be changed at all?

If it is, will the Furlings come?

Or will they send her back across dimensions again?

Or to somewhere else?

"Colonel O'Neill," she says firmly and formally, banishing thoughts of what she cannot change. Cannot control.

"Dr. Jackson?" His tone is equally formal.

"I still need an office."

"We're arranging it. And I think you've probably just about got time to unpack before you're due down at the gym. So, I'll see you later."

He's planning on a 'later.' That's reassuring.

She hates needing the reassurance, but things have changed. If not for Jack, she wouldn't be here at all.

He's one of her chesspieces, and she needs to know where he is.

"Just be sure to leave some time to hook up with Harry," she tells him.

Striving for normalcy.

"You couldn't tell me exactly when he's going to be here?"

"Precognition is not an exact science," she answers, though it's not exactly precognition. She checks her watch - it's new - for the current date. "Next Saturday, actually. But he said he'd been watching your house for several days."

"Well at least somebody is. I'm just sorry it's him."

#

Jack leaves. She unpacks. She'll link her laptop to the mainframe and download the necessary software later. It's a lengthy process.

Some things are already here.

Workout clothes, for example.

She takes what she needs and goes down to the gym.

#

Janet has scheduled her for two hours of gym time twice a day; today she only has the afternoon session to deal with.

Just as well.

She knew she was out of condition, but she'd walked almost everywhere in Palos Verdes. Apparently it didn't help. She starts with the machines set to her usual tolerances and has to reset everything. She's drenched in sweat and exhausted before she completes the circuit, and skips the weight-lifting.

She goes back to her quarters, showers, and falls asleep.

#

"No skipping dinner."

Jack sitting down on the edge of the bed wakes her. That, and the smell of pizza.

"I fell asleep," she protests, rolling over and opening her eyes.

"Anchovy for you, pepperoni for me, and a nice selection of-"

He sets down the two pizza boxes on the bed beside her. There are a stack of DVDs on top of them. The top box is familiar. She reacts without thinking.

_"No!"_

She lashes out, and _The Wizard of Oz_ goes spinning across the floor.

She scrambles back to the top of the bed, as far away from the box as she can get, as if it's a poisonous serpent.

Jack has actually drawn his gun and is pointing it at the box.

"No," she says, knowing she has to explain. "It's… I was watching _The Wizard of Oz_ when the Furlings brought me back. I'm not sure it wouldn't have the same effect again."

Jack lets out a sigh and holsters his gun.

_"The Mummy? Independence Day? Armageddon?"_

She looks through the rest of the scattered pile. _"Men In Black."_

"I'll get Teal'c then. He loves that movie."

"Is Sammy still here?"

"I'll check."

It's not that she hasn't watched _The Wizard of Oz_ since she got back to this side.

She did, hoping it would have precisely the effect she told Jack about.

It had none at all.

She's just afraid things might be different now that she's happy.

#

Sammy is still on-Base and the four of them congregate in Dani's quarters - her home: just like Teal'c, now, she has no other - and watch the movie.

She thinks of other things to change.

Jack lost Charlie. She knows it still hurts.

Rya'c and Master Bra'tac will be leaving for Erebus soon, as far as she can figure out the time.

They were saved later. Daniel managed to remember their capture, one of the few memories he retrieved from his Ascension.

If the Furlings are going to remove her for meddling at all, they will do it soon.

Why not keep the last of Teal'c's family from going at all?

She takes a deep breath.

Two small changes. Then she'll stop for a while. Think.

Try to decide what the Furlings have tried to make of her.

She has a little time to decide about Abydos. It will be half a year still in The Other Reality before Anubis comes there to seek out the Eye of Ra. Time.

After Abydos, Daniel will be gone. He is gone now, of course, but she can still tell herself - for a while - that he isn't. That he can see her if he chooses; Ascension being a sort of mock-Afterlife, reminding her of angels and the Christian heaven. After Abydos, he will be truly gone, a parting as absolute and final as death.

One that leads to their first meeting.

It's a spiral. The Furlings build in spirals. The Spiral Castle is the gate to the Celtic Otherworld. A maze.

There is no way out of the maze the Furlings have trapped her in.

She gets up - she's been sitting at Jack's feet - and goes to stand behind Teal'c. Jack is - to all appearances - engrossed in the movie, though its one they've all seen several times.

She leans over Teal'c, speaks quickly and softly in his own language.

_"‹There's a planet called Erebus; it's a death-camp for Jaffa who refuse to take new masters after they're captured in battle._ Hat'ak _are assembled there. Bra'tac and Rya'c are going there soon to recruit Jaffa for the Rebellion, if they haven't gone already. The Stargate has an energy field on it similar to our iris. Bra'tac has the code to unlock it, but he'll be ambushed by the Jaffa at the Stargate when Ba'al takes the planet. The two of them will be trapped there and nobody will know.›"_

But Teal'c knows, now.

She's changed the future. Twice.

_"‹When does Baal do this?›"_ Teal'c asks. His voice is low and calm.

She shakes her head. _"‹I don't know. Events won't match the ones on The Other Side exactly.›"_ Because the other SG-1 had helped Baal gain control of the System Lords to level the playing field against Anubis after Anubis had gained the Eye of Ra and the _naquaadriah_ technology. That was how - and why - Baal had taken Erebus.

Anubis didn't have the one. Yet. And the other had been destroyed.

_"‹But it was months from now… there.›"_

"Then there is time to consider carefully what we must do, Danielle Jackson," Teal'c says. "I thank you for telling me this. I am in your debt."

"Guys?" Jack says. "We're getting to the good part."

She goes back and sits down again.

#

One of the unwritten rules of second marriages is not talking about the first one.

He knows that damned well.

Sara is certainly never going to come up in the conversation.

They might - he thinks - have to break the rules over this Daniel guy. Or bend the hell out of them. Not because she was married to him - and he'll keep that out of things for her as long as it doesn't seem to be important - but because he was on the Other SG-1, and whatever happened Over There, he's sure SG-1 was right in the middle of it.

In the Mirror Universe.

He wonders if Daniel Jackson had a beard.

The Alternate Apophis had a beard.

He wonders what he was … like. Indy's a handful just the way she is. He put up with a helluva lot from her, well…

Because she was smart. Because she was right, a lot of the time. Because she cared so damned much. About everything.

And because.

But that goes right out the window if she's a …guy. If Daniel Jackson ever mouthed off to him the way Dani Jackson did, he'd deck the guy, civilian consultant or not.

And several of their missions probably wouldn't have turned out quite the same way.

Crap, he hopes not. If they did, he's probably still filling out the paperwork Over There.

But that's the past. It's the future that worries him. The future she's already lived through - there. And came back terrified to change.

And just plain terrified.

She's given Carter something, though. And she's talking to Teal'c now.

She's already told him they make it through alive on The Other Side. They're fine there.

Carter says she told her 'the variables make a difference,' whatever the hell that means. And she doesn't think they're going to be fine here.

Dammit, they've got to get her to talk.

The best way he's found to get Indy to talk when she doesn't want to - a skill he's rarely needed - is to pretend he has no interest in whatever she doesn't want to tell him.

He hopes his nerves are up to this.

#

The others leave after the movie is over. Jack stays of course.

She feels oddly shy. Being here, with him, in the SGC.

Guards outside the door.

Cameras everywhere, even if they're shut down.

It reminds her of the first nights on the _Daedalus_. With Daniel.

Jack locks the door from the inside. Command privilege.

Waits.

"Bra'tac and Rya'c are going on a mission that goes bad. I told Teal'c."

"Ah."

"Jack-"

"Come to bed."

#

Everything she put in storage has been at the SGC for months; almost since she left, in fact. She's more than a little irritated by that when she finds out, but it does make setting up her new office quicker and easier.

Her days are spent, it seems to her, in eating, exercising, and sleeping. It gets easier. Janet is pleased at her progress.

She is lamentably out-of-practice with the quarterstaff.

No one - not Jack, not Sammy, not even General Hammond - asks her any awkward questions.

News of her marriage quickly makes the rounds of Base gossip. She receives congratulations, though some of them are a bit puzzled, considering where she's living.

Jack is not with her every night, or even most of them, after the first. He can't be. He's waiting for Maybourne, and that means he has to be at his house.

Those nights are bad. She can't sleep. She's restricted to quarters - she has a curfew - but her laptop is there and it's connected to the mainframe. She spends her sleepless nights in work.

She has a theory. It occupies her days as well. She hasn't got a posting. She's still in limbo.

Better than Cataloguing and Transcription.

Her old clearances are gone. There are places on the Base she can no longer go. Files she can no longer access.

She hates feeling guilty and tries not to feel frustrated, but she knows she'll have to work hard to get back into General Hammond's good graces.

She's not sure how, considering she isn't talking.

But nobody's asking her anything.

It feels as if she's tried to put her foot on a step that isn't there. She has an office, but she isn't back. She's waiting for a debriefing that she doesn't want to participate in, and it hasn't come.

When SG-1 goes through the Gate, she isn't there. She isn't cleared for Level 28. She knows, though, that they go alone, just the three of them.

They have no permanent fourth. When the mission requires it, they work with one of the A/T floats.

Like she was on The Other Side.

She tries not to think about that.

She tries not to think about her other husband.

She concentrates on her theory.

The Furlings have created her - a sort of tame, denatured Ascended Being - and sent her back to her own universe to see what she will do.

That much, she thinks, is true.

The Furlings were once members of a confederation of what they call the Four Great Races, along with the Nox, the Asgard, and the Ancients - who became the Ascended. That confederation is long-sundered. Why and how?

What do the Furlings hope to learn from doing this to her?

The Furlings created the quantum mirrors - she's fairly sure of that. With them, they can see every variation of Reality there is. Surely that provides enough answers for any race.

But it does not explain why the Ascended act as they do.

Is that what the Furlings want to know?

She wonders why they don't simply _ask_ one of the Ascended. Surely they have the power?

Of course, the Ascended may refuse to speak to them.

The Ascended certainly have the power to do that.

Unless they're using her as a stalking horse to lure the Ascended in.

She meddles. They stop her.

But they won't. Because she isn't Ascended. She gained her knowledge in an ordinary - though bizarre - fashion.

Unlike Daniel.

She thought - on The Other Side - that the Ascended were the key. Because the Furlings were so careful to place her in the time-stream _after_ Daniel had already Descended again.

If they hadn't…

Daniel would have known what they were doing, and why.

But he wouldn't have warned his friends.

Would he?

But.

Would Other-Jack have taken her instead of Jonas Quinn for SG-1 if she'd been there right after Kelowna? He might have. It's possible. She would not have known the things about the _naquaadriah_ that Jonas did. Would not have done the same things, made the same suggestions. It was Jonas who made the suggestion to Other-Sam that kept their Stargate from exploding. Bekka McKay made it here, but there's no Bekka McKay there. Their reality would have run differently.

Enough to destroy them?

She doesn't know.

She _does_ know that arriving when Daniel was alive again, a member of SG-1 again, made her simply … redundant. Unable to make any major difference there.

Which must be what the Furlings intended.

There is a version of this reality - a loop of time - that encompasses the five years she spent away. Five years in which SG-1 was dead.

She wonders what happened here in those years.

Did the Furlings come here - then - with their poisonous gifts, just as they originally said? Did General Hammond accept them? What happened?

No way to know.

Obviously nobody here remembers that alternate, now-unmade future.

It's maddening.

#

Maybourne arrives right on schedule. It takes Jack about another week to reel him in.

She's called to the conference room.

Maybourne smiles at her. He's sure he's got the upper hand.

"Dr. Jackson. Nice to see you again. Or is it Mrs. - or Dr. - O'Neill these days?"

Harry always likes them to know he's on top of the news.

"I must say," he goes on, "you're looking a lot better than the last time I saw you. What was it? Oh, about six months ago."

She doesn't need to look at Jack to know he's gone tense. Six months ago she was in Palos Verdes. She sighs.

"I suppose you want me to say I didn't see you there, Harry. And then you'll say I was too drunk to notice. Can we get to why you're here?"

Maybourne looks disappointed. She's stepping on his lines.

He goes through his presentation. It's nothing she was around for there - it was while Jonas was a member of SG-1 on The Other Side - but she has a good memory, and the reports she read were detailed. Finally he produces the scarab-shaped key.

She looks up, meets Jack's eye. Nods.

"That's wonderful, Harry," Jack says. "Now why don't you go take a nice rest while we talk among ourselves?"

"I'm the only one who can make it work, Jack!"

"Oh, I don't doubt that, Harry."

Maybourne is led - protesting - from the room by armed SFs.

She picks up the key. It's heavier than it looks.

"We have the address. We have the key," Jack says, looking at her.

And a couple of pages of nearly-indecipherable photocopies that Maybourne has brought with him. She picks one up, peers at it.

"Dr. Jackson?" General Hammond asks.

"It's the same one I saw represented," she says, gesturing with the key. "Harry took it with him through the door. I don't know whether that's a requirement or not. I'm not sure if I can read these even if they're enhanced. But there's not a weapons cache on the other side. The doorway he wants to open teleports you to the moon of the planet. He thinks it's a paradise… a sort of peaceful Elysium."

"But you said it was invaded by the _Goa'uld_ ," General Hammond says.

"A while ago," she answers. "The door is set up to take away all _Goa'uld_ weaponry - Harry and …Colonel O'Neill… were able to bring their Earth weapons through it. The _Goa'uld_ that came through brought a food plant. Colonel O'Neill thought it was supposed to make the inhabitants subservient. It made them violently paranoid. They killed the _Goa'uld_ and each other. So there's nothing there now."

"General, I vote we let Harry go right ahead," Jack says.

"And how is it that Colonel Maybourne was able to get through this doorway?" Colonel Hammond asks. "I can't believe any version of us would allow Harry Maybourne access to weapons."

She shakes her head. "He had some concealed grenades; they went through. But he fought with Major Carter and grabbed her zat, and that didn't get through. He used it to take Colonel O'Neill and Major Carter down. But Colonel O'Neill grabbed him. That was why they went through together."

"Well, we'll make sure this doesn't happen this time," General Hammond says.

He can't be serious about still sending them to check this out.

"But-"

"Just in case you're wrong, Dr. Jackson," General Hammond says gently.

"At least let me go with them."

"I'm sorry."

#

An hour later, the mission is geared up to go.

General Hammond lets her watch from the Control Room.

Harry has been thoroughly searched. The grenades have been found. As a result, he's in shackles, wrist and ankle. Protesting.

SG-1 has a fourth this trip. She knows him. Casio.

She doesn't trust him to keep them safe.

That should be her down there.

They walk through the event horizon and vanish.

It occurs to her, with a despairing sense of inevitability, that she might as well tell them everything she knows. By marrying Jack, she has already changed her universe's future profoundly. There are appointments she is meant to keep, years from now, as a member of SG-1. And she won't be able to.

But will SG-1 even be alive by then?

She's so confused.

She doesn't, she realizes, know the future after all. She knows _a_ future - a collection of facts - that can't possibly happen here. And because that future can't happen, the one she imagines happening is bleak and doomed.

"Please let me know when they come back, sir," she says quietly.

She walks slowly from the Control Room.

She'd used to be one of the best.

How could she have been so _stupid?_

_Don't meddle,_ Daniel had said. And oh, he'd been right. Go, stay away, do her best to pretend she wasn't here at all, let their future unfold as if she were dead. But since Jack has made that impossible, wasn't the next best thing to try to do exactly what she would have done without the foreknowledge?

Only that was impossible, too. Not Jack's fault. _Hers._

She hadn't had to kiss him.

Weak, short-sighted, unstable, and foolish.

Not good enough. Never good enough.

Is that what the Furlings want to know about humans?

She's sure it isn't true of the Ascended.

She reaches her office, enters, and closes the door.

She wants SG-1 back.

She knows it's the one thing she can't have.

#

Everything is a change.

She paces her office.

Being here - but not stepping back into her place, not trying to live out the future as she knows it, step by step - is changing it.

The Furlings have changed the future they should have had by allowing SG-1 to survive Kelowna.

Their future is different from Daniel's because Kelowna isn't there.

She can't pretend not to know what she does know.

"Daniel - dammit - _God!"_ she sweeps a pile of books off her desk in frustration, wishing there were something here to break.

She'd like him to show up so she could argue with him, but that would be a little too convenient.

She suspects he watches over her, though. Will do so for as long as he can.

Not all that much longer, now.

But if he is, why hasn't he kept her from making all the mistakes she has? Kept her from leaving. Kept her from coming back.

Because the Ascended aren't supposed to meddle.

Daniel meddled on Abydos. And drew the wrath of the Ascended.

They're pretty sure that's why he ended up on Vis Uban.

"You're my husband. You're _supposed_ to meddle."

She has a new husband now.

He wants her to meddle.

Daniel - with Ascended wisdom to draw on - thinks she should leave things alone.

Sammy said not to try to change the future when they were stuck in the past.

But it isn't really their future. Just an echo of it.

Daniel is the variable. He's there, but not here. What he did there saved their future. If this universe follows the pattern of the one she knows, it will end if she doesn't meddle. In less than five years.

If she does meddle, it may end anyway. Sooner.

That's the central problem.

Keep her world - her universe - from ending. But if - _if_ \- her universe follows the same pattern as theirs, the only way she knows of to keep it from ending is if Daniel is involved, with the powers of an Ascended Being. And she's Daniel's counterpart, and she doesn't have those powers. So her universe has to die.

Doesn't it? Does it?

The Furlings sent her here to meddle.

Why?

Everything she knows about them tells her that they're heartless and cruel. She's fairly certain they didn't send her here with the knowledge and ability to save her universe.

She's afraid of them.

#

Two hours later General Hammond calls her back to the Gate Room.

She comes at a run.

SG-1 is coming back through the Stargate. She and General Hammond are on the Gate Room floor to greet them.

Harry is unconscious. Teal'c is carrying him.

"We had a great time, General," Jack says. "No weapons cache. Saw a nice field of yellow flowers, though. Looked kinda like daisies."

He tosses her the scarab key. She catches it.

Teal'c drops Harry unceremoniously at the foot of the ramp.

"Welcome home, SG-1. We'll debrief in one hour. Dr. Jackson, I'd like you to attend."

"Yes, General," she says.

Two SFs come and carry Harry away. She stares after him curiously.

"Did you hit him?" she asks Jack.

"Zat," he says succinctly.

Well, Harry deserved it.

"Gonna hit the showers," Jack says. "See you at the debrief."

She nods.

It is like any other day at the SGC. If they weren't married. And the universe weren't about to end.

#

She gets the whole story at the debriefing. Harry stalled, saying he was having trouble getting the key to work, obviously refusing to open the Doorway-or-Weapons-Cache while they were nearby. So they pretended to wander off. Jack snuck back and zatted him the moment he activated the Door. In chains, Harry hadn't been able to move fast enough to get through.

Casio's pretty sure he has the whole opening sequence on film.

"All we saw through the doorway was a field, General. Nice flowers. Nothing that looked like a weapons cache of any kind. And… considering where Indy said we'd end up, I didn't really want to take a closer look. When Harry wakes up, we can ask him a few questions. He might be a little more forthcoming now."

"We'll hope so, Colonel. That seems to be everything, then. SG-1, you're dismissed. Colonel, Dr. Jackson, my office."

The two of them follow General Hammond to his office.

She's been expecting this.

Dreading it.

#

"Sit down," General Hammond says.

They take their seats.

General Hammond regards her steadily.

"Just what else is it that you think you know, Dr. Jackson?"

"General Hammond-" she begins desperately.

"Dani."

Jack's voice stops her.

"Now, Teal'c has already requested permission to go home to visit his family. Certainly I intend to allow him to do so. Is it because of something you've told him?"

She stares at her hands. "Yes, sir."

"I admit that even when you were so certain that you knew, well, let's say, future events, I wasn't completely convinced. But in the light of what we've seen today, that does seem to be the case. You understand that if the rest of your information proves equally accurate, you are in possession of strategic intelligence that could be vital to Earth's defense."

"Or it might not make any difference if I tell you," she says dully. Hopelessly. "Or the Furlings might have sent me here, knowing what I know, so I would tell you, and destroy you."

"Dr. Jackson, do you have any reason to believe that may be the case?" General Hammond asks.

He trusted her once. Her judgment.

All of them did.

Jack loves her, but she's not sure - entirely - if he trusts her now.

She's thrown that away.

She doesn't know if she'll ever get it back.

She won't get SG-1 back.

She takes a deep breath.

The truth. She has to tell them the truth.

Truth. Or silence. But not a lie.

"General Hammond, I actually don't think they care about us at all. I think we're nothing more than… lab rats to them. I think they're performing some kind of experiment involving the nature of the Ascended. That's as much as I can figure out."

"The Ascended?" General Hammond sounds puzzled and faintly incredulous. They've never been to Kheb. They know almost nothing of the Ascended, beyond what she's told them, and she knows he does not entirely trust what she's told him.

She makes an abortive gesture. "The Ascended have the same sort of knowledge of events as I've been given. I think I've been given. In a way. They don't seem to be bound by time. So I'm a sort of experiment, because the Ascended have to follow rules about not interfering with … mortals. And I… don't."

"Well, that sucks," Jack says succinctly.

General Hammond sighs. "None of this explains why you have been so overpoweringly reluctant to tell us what you experienced in the alternate universe. Now why don't you just explain it to me, and let me make the decisions?"

She laughs despairingly and throws up her hands. "In five years we're all going to die. Anubis is going to destroy the entire Galaxy and everything in it. And there's not a single thing I can think of to stop it."

Silence. She expects to be struck by lightning. Something. But nothing happens.

"The whole Galaxy, huh?" Jack says. "A little ambitious, even for a snakehead."

"But our … counterparts found a way to stop him?" General Hammond asks after a long pause.

"They had - will have - help that we won't - can't - have," she says, falteringly.

Daniel.

"So you're just giving up?" Jack asks.

"I can't think of a solution!" she cries, turning on him. "I can't! I've _tried!"_

"We're a team, Indy," he says quietly. "Carter's at least as smart as you are. She'll think of something. But you've got to give us something to go on."

"I need to go to Abydos," she says.

She's going to give them Daniel. She knows she is. But she can't bear to just yet. If she takes out the Eye of Ra, that will give her a little more time.

It's only a moment later, looking at their faces, that she realizes that what she's said sounds to them like the sheerest of non-sequiters. As if she's asking to run home to hide. She shakes her head.

"The Eye of Ra is on Abydos. It's one of six. Anubis already has the other five. Each alone is powerful; together they make a … superweapon. Once he has it, he'll take over the System Lords, probably wipe them out. He's been searching all of Ra's domain. He'll be trying Abydos soon. I think I know where on Abydos it is."

"General?" Jack says.

General Hammond studies her for a long moment, then nods.

"Very well. At 0800 tomorrow morning, SG-1 and Dr. Jackson, you will go to Abydos, retrieve the Eye of Ra, and bring it back here. At that time, Dr. Jackson, I will expect you to be prepared to explain yourself more completely."

"Yes, General."

She isn't sure that's possible. Explaining herself.

"Dismissed."

She and Jack leave the office.

"Glad you've finally decided to come home," he says quietly, when they're outside.

Home.

She realizes that she has.

It's taken her a long time to get here, actually.

But she's back now.

And she's going to fight for it.

#

They Gate through to Abydos in the morning.

Almost like old times.

All Sammy and Mr. T know is that they're here to pick up another _Goa'uld_ device. Just as well.

"We should see Kasuf and Skaara while we're here," she says, walking down the steps. The familiar smells of home - her other home - envelop her.

_"Dana're!"_

Skaara steps out from behind a pillar. He envelops her in a fierce hug, swings her around.

_"‹You are too thin! You have been sick again!›"_ he accuses.

"Skaara! What are you doing here?" She hugs her brother tightly.

"We guard the _chappa'ai,_ as you said." He gestures. The other guards appear from hiding.

"You should be home with Neshat," she tells him. Neshat is Skaara's wife. They have a child already.

He shrugs. _"‹She is breeding again. She told me to go away.›"_

Dani laughs. It feels strange.

"You must come and see your family," he says.

She glances at Jack. He smiles. "Soon, I promise," she tells him. "Right now… we came to find something that Ra left here. And I think Jack has something to say to you."

"O'Neer?"

Jack looks quizzical. She rolls her eyes.

Skaara once told her he would give her to Jack. She hopes Jack figures out that he needs to ask her family to give her to him.

"Teal'c. Carter. Go keep Indy out of trouble."

The three of them move off.

#

"Think he's going to figure it out?" Sammy asks, when they're out of earshot. There's a corridor at the back of the pyramid - she opened it long ago - that leads to a series of catacombs. That's where she's headed.

"My god, I hope so. I'm not supposed to mention anything to either Skaara or Kasuf myself," she says.

"To what do you refer?" Teal'c asks.

"Well," she says, "Jack has to ask them - technically he should ask Kasuf, but Skaara is here, and I was supposed to be Skaara's _hemet,_ so it's sort of a special case - to give me to him. We're already married, but I hope Kasuf won't think that counts, since we weren't married here."

"Such is also the custom on Chulak," Teal'c says. "Is it not so on Earth?"

"It used to be, a long time ago," she says. "But our social patterns changed."

"For the better," Sammy says. "What would happen if Kasuf said 'no?' Because I can't imagine Skaara saying 'no.'"

She can't either. Skaara is crazy about Jack.

"Well, Kasuf won't either. I'm much too old to marry here. He knows that even a crazy _Tau'ri_ is better than no husband at all. He'll probably even waive the bride-price. Ah, here we are."

She faces the wall, unclips her pack, and begins digging through it.

"Bride-price?" Sammy asks, sounding both scandalized and intrigued. "How much do you figure you're worth?"

"Well, fourteen years ago, when I came here, I was a bit old for it, but still, I was royal. I think I would have fetched at least twenty goats then, or the equivalent-"

She winces, hearing what she has just said.

It has been only seven years for Sammy.

She brushes away the dust from the wall. The red light of her laser pointer opens it. The treasure room is revealed.

"What are we looking for?" Sammy asks.

"Big… round… flat… design like the flip side of Catherine Langford's pendant."

And not out here.

She takes a hammer from her tools and starts tapping the painted walls of the treasure room.

"A secret compartment inside a secret room?" Sammy says.

"Why not?" she asks.

She knows there is one. She just doesn't know where it is.

One wall sounds hollow. There's a compartment behind it. She starts looking for the latch.

The pyramid shakes.

It is an intense sustained shimmying, as if of an earthquake, but she has never experienced an earthquake in all the time she has been on Abydos, and deserts aren't known for them, anyway.

All three of them freeze, but the shaking passes.

She finds the trigger sequence, presses the right places on the panel. The block slides down.

There's the Eye of Ra.

It's bigger than she thought, set in an ornate gold and enamel carrier. She picks it up, tucks it into her backpack.

"Everybody back to the Stargate! _Now!"_

It's Jack's voice over their radios. She grabs her backpack and they run.

There is another shaking as they go. This one is long and sustained, but not as strong as the first, and she recognizes it.

A _ha'tak_ is landing on top of the pyramid.

Anubis has come. Months too early.

"No!" she cries in shock.

Sammy drags her back into cover just as a contingent of Jaffa run past them. In their hurry, they don't look into the shadows. But when the Jaffa reach the treasure room and find it open, they'll be in trouble.

They must have ringed down from the mothership while it was still in orbit.

Ahead, she hears the sound of gunfire. Staff weapons.

They're cut off from the Gate Room and Jack's in trouble.

She grabs Sammy and drags her back the other way. Teal'c follows.

"Dani, we have to-"

"I need a minute."

She takes them to a small chamber. She knows this warren of rooms intimately.

"Sammy, are you carrying any C4?"

"Sure," Sammy says, puzzled. She almost always is.

Dani pulls out the Eye. "Rig it. We can't let them get it."

"You want to blow it up?" Sammy asks.

"I want to hold it hostage, if we have to. That's probably Anubis up there. If I'm right, he's sent Herak down here to retrieve the Eye." She shakes her head in baffled anger. "But he shouldn't be here yet. Either way, Herak won't dare risk destroying the Eye."

Sammy works quickly: C4, fuses, detonator. Done.

"Okay, give it to me."

"Dani-"

"Believe me when I tell you that I am the very last person in the entire Galaxy that you want Anubis taking as a host. Where's my duct tape?"

Sammy looks at her, nods. They tape the bomb to her stomach, wrapping the tape around and around her. She buttons her jacket over it. She holds the detonator carefully.

If she drops it wrong, they will all die.

"Carter-" Jack, over the radio.

"Sir, we have the Eye of Ra and we've booby-trapped it to keep it from falling into enemy hands. There are Jaffa already in the catacombs. We're cut off."

"We've had to abandon the Gate Room. I've got Skaara with me. What's your position?"

"Tell him the Blue Lotus Room. Skaara will know," Dani says.

"Sir, Indy says we're in the Blue Lotus Room."

#

By the time O'Neill and Skaara get there, the other three are trapped there. The corridor is filled with dead Jaffa, though, but he and Skaara manage to make short work of the rest. As they come out, he sees Indy appropriate one of the dropped staff weapons with something like her old grace.

She's holding a detonator in her left hand.

"You might want to hand that to Carter, Indiana," he says.

"Can't," she says, grinning at him. "I'm the one the bomb's taped to." She taps her stomach. "They're not going to get it."

"You call this a plan?"

Not that she was ever the one with the plans, in the old days. Wild ideas, yes, and sometimes he used them. But hardly plans.

"Stopgap. If that's Herak out there working under Anubis's orders, he won't dare risk damage to the Eye. We can bluff him. I hope," she says.

Maybe back through the Stargate. He knows that's what she's thinking.

And it looks like sometime while she's been gone she's learned about planning. About giving orders.

Of course, it probably helps that all of this is old news to her. At least some of it. He knows she wasn't expecting Anubis to be here. The whole point of coming now was to get in and out ahead of the snakehead.

He doesn't think this is the time to tell her that Nagada is gone.

He's pretty sure, anyway.

When he felt that first big quake he and the Gate guards all went to the doorway of the pyramid. The whole horizon - Nagada is that way, and so are the old _naquaadah_ mines - was on fire. There was a pillar of fire at least a mile high. Firestorm.

The _ha'tak_ must have hit the place from orbit just for fun.

Then the Jaffa showed up, cutting them off from the Stargate. Skaara's the only one of the Abydan Gate guards left alive.

The other four look at him. Waiting for miracles, or at least orders. Indy looks more preoccupied than anything else right now, thinking about god knows what; not quite what he'd like to see in this situation, but better than panic.

He'd like to be able to rely on her, but this is her first time through the Gate since Kelowna, and he's just not sure. She's been … somewhere else … for seven years and become an unknown quantity. It doesn't matter whether she's better than she was before, or worse. She's different, and in the field, that's all that matters.

"We need to work our way back to the Gate Room, take out the guards, and dial home," O'Neill says.

Simple.

"And, Indy? Give me the bomb."

#

It takes them a while.

There's not a lot of cover in the Gate Room, even assuming they get back there, and by now Herak knows that (a) there are _Tau'ri_ on Abydos and (b) somebody has the Eye of Ra and it isn't him, so he's undoubtedly got a guard on the Stargate if he didn't have one before. The upside to all this is that O'Neill has gone up against Herak before and knows that - for a Jaffa - Herak tends to sloppy hysterics.

And Indy knows the catacombs better than anyone, even Skaara.

They manage to evade Jaffa patrols in the catacombs for almost three-quarters of an hour before they're caught. They've almost reached the Stargate.

"Oh, uh, _hi,"_ Indy says brightly as they round a corner and come face to face with six Jaffa.

They'd retreat, but there are more back the other way.

"We've got the Eye of Ra and we'll destroy it if you come any closer," she says. Ever-helpful, she repeats the sentence in their own language. O'Neill could swear he sees Teal'c repress a smile. Indy would offer the devil ice-water in Hell; that hasn't changed. "Go tell Herak."

It doesn't take Herak long to show up.

"Herak, buddy, good to see you. Nice to know we're in the presence of true incompetence," O'Neill says.

"You are all my prisoners, _Tau'ri_ ," Herak says. He raises his zat.

"Ah, bomb?" O'Neill says. He raises his hand, shows off the device. "Shoot me, it goes off, we all die."

" _Tau'ri_ are cowards. You do not have the courage," Herak tells him loftily.

"Well," O'Neill says, "that's why it's called a dead man switch. And now that we've got that out of the way, why don't I go on to explain the concept of a Mexican standoff?"

"You will never escape," Herak snarls. But he retreats.

They proceed to the Gate Room.

#

They're at one end, Herak and his Jaffa are at the other. Unfortunately, Herak is at the end with the Stargate.

They have cover. That's about it. Herak can't use a shock grenade, because the C4 will go off when they're knocked out. But she knows as well as Jack does that Herak must be hoping to get his hands on one of them, try to get them to trade the lives of one or all of their friends for the Eye.

"Any ideas?" Jack says, looking around.

She shrugs. "We can trade it for our lives. Unacceptable. We can blow it up here. Don't like that much better."

Jack grimaces, agreeing.

"How'd they get out of it there?" Jack asks.

The Other SG-1, he means.

"Daniel convinced them to give it up to protect the people of Abydos. It turned out to be a bad idea."

"Ya think?" Jack asks bitterly.

_"‹Dana're, there is no one left to protect,›"_ Skaara says. His eyes are filled with tears. _"‹Anubis has already destroyed our village. I have seen the fire burning in the east.›"_

"He did what?" she says, in English. "When? Skaara, _why?"_

She looks at Jack.

"Anubis hit Nagada when he arrived," he says quietly. "I don't think there's anything left."

Kasuf. Skaara's family. All her friends. Dead.

Sha're's tomb. Gone.

"Then he knew the Eye was here," she says.

He was certain enough that it was in the pyramid - and not Nagada - to destroy Nagada without searching it.

She needs to think about that. But there isn't time now.

"Is there any way we can fool Herak?" Sammy asks. "Give him something else instead?"

"No. Anubis has told him what he's looking for. But… let me see it."

They're crouched behind one of the pillars. Herak is waiting in front of the Stargate. Mexican standoff. He's gotten the idea pretty quickly.

Jack passes her the Eye.

She carefully removes the block of C4 from it. It's sticky. C4 is like modeling clay. Modeling clay that goes bang. The C4 completely covers the Eye itself: the round red jewel like a slice of crimson jelly in the center of the enamel carrier, the gem itself embossed with a golden 'Ra's Eye' in low relief. She pries it loose, presses the C4 back into position. Looks at Jack. Shrugs.

Drops the Eye - the actual Eye, the part Anubis wants - into her pocket. Catches his eye. He nods. She'll be the one to carry it.

Jack gets to his feet, takes the enamel carrier and the C4.

"Hey Herak! Let's make a deal!"

#

They pass the doctored Eye to Herak at the last possible moment; after the Gate has been dialed and Sammy has sent their IDC. Jack throws it, and the five of them run. Herak tears the C4 loose, sees he's been fooled. The Jaffa open fire.

They dive through the Event Horizon.

Energy blasts racket across the Gate Room, firing through the Stargate. The iris clangs shut. She crawls to her knees, and for a moment she thinks they've fooled Death again.

Then she sees Skaara.

He's still alive, but only for moments more. A staff-blast has taken him in the belly. She crawls to him, holds him in her arms.

"Neshat-" he whispers.

Then he is gone.

Medics come running. Teal'c is wounded, but he will heal.

Jack kneels in front of her, putting his arms around both her and Skaara for a moment. Then he takes Skaara's body away from her, though she clings to it in desperate silence. The medics are at her sides, asking if she's all right. She can't answer.

"What happened?" General Hammond demands.

"Anubis got there ahead of schedule," Jack says harshly, getting to his feet and turning away. "He took out Abydos. He doesn't have the Eye. We do."

She gets to her feet. Fumbles in her pocket. Holds it out.

"This is what they died for, General."

Jack takes it from her, hands it to General Hammond.

"Report to the Infirmary," General Hammond says. His face is bleak.

#

There will be a debriefing, but it can wait. She goes from the Infirmary to her quarters.

She's stopped to make sure Teal'c is all right. He has promised he'll be fine.

She has promised Sammy she'll be okay.

She doesn't know if that's true.

She's told Jack she'll see him later. He'll be making a preliminary report to General Hammond right now. He'll be a while.

She lets herself in to Isolation Quarters.

It would be nice, just at the moment, if they were what their name implies.

What she wants, most of all, is a good stiff drink. No chance of that. No alcohol on Base, just for starters. And she's on the wagon. A month of sobriety today.

Drunk was better.

Everyone on Abydos is dead.

Just like in The Other Reality.

Only she's made no deal with Anubis. He hadn't even been supposed to be there. They should have been able to get there and leave safely. His arrival was supposed to be months in the future.

Only…

Anubis was Ascended, once.

He was sent back, as Daniel was.

But he didn't get sent back all the way.

He retains the Ascended knowledge. If he uses it, he'll be punished. But he has it.

He can only use the knowledge he could have gained by ordinary means.

Such as seeing her come to Abydos and search the pyramid.

She - using the knowledge she gained on The Other Side - brought Anubis to Abydos.

Anubis knows what she knows.

She curls up on her bed, a tight ball of misery.

_And Daniel knew that Anubis knew. What he knew, and how he knew, and what use he would make of me. That was why he didn't want me to use what I knew. Because Anubis would use me._

It all makes sense now.

And Daniel couldn't tell her.

She does cry, then. The tears are slow, and thick, and burn like acid. Because she can still see no way out of using what she knows. The alternative is death, and victory for Anubis and the _Goa'uld_. Annihilation for a Galaxy. It's what they've been fighting against all along.

And they won today. At the price of thousands of lives, but they won.

If Daniel was playing his own game here - against the Furlings, against Anubis - what else did he do?

She sits up, gets up, washes her face.

Paces. Not thinking. Just letting the knowledge, the realization, surface.

It is something she has known without knowing it.

About Jack. About herself.

#

"You set me up," she says quietly. "You set both of us up."

Jack will be coming soon. She doesn't really expect an answer.

"You would have done it eventually."

She turns around. Daniel is standing behind her.

He is dressed as if for Abydos. He isn't wearing his glasses. The Ascended - of course - don't need glasses.

She has known Jack for fourteen years, in his presence and absence. She has been married to him for less than a month. She loves him, and knows he loves her, but things are … difficult … right now, because of what she knows and hasn't told. Like the future, things between them may get better, or much worse.

But from the beginning, she and Daniel understood each other in a way that she and Jack never will. Just talking to Daniel was a glorious adventure. They explored the universe together without leaving Earth.

She misses him, especially now.

Which life is truly hers? The new one in The Other Reality that she lost? The old one here that she's returned to?

It is unfair to have to choose.

"So because of you we did it now."

He smiles. Glances down. "I just helped you both see things clearly. You did all the rest."

He meddled.

He's always meddling.

It's why he was cast out of Ascension.

"Why?"

_Daniel, I love you._

"Figured out what the Furlings want yet?" he asks.

No.

"Anubis came to Abydos early."

_Because of me. You knew he would._

And Kasuf, Skaara, everyone there, is dead.

"I know," he says. "I'm sorry."

He must have been watching.

#

It hasn't worked out the way it was supposed to.

The way he expected - intended - it to.

She loves Jack.

He knows she does.

She's seen already that her silence keeps Jack and the others alive.

By opening their hearts to each other, he gave her a greater stake in keeping Jack alive - in silence - than ever before.

And given Jack more reason to trust her.

Not that Jack didn't trust her. He always has. Just as his Jack O'Neill trusted him. But it's easier when all the cards are on the table.

But she barely got back here before she started telling them things. Not just that she knew the future - _a_ future. That was bad enough, but if she could have left it at that, in silence, things would have worked out. But telling them future events. Things they could change.

Things they _did_ change.

And now, as if he has stepped out of a cave onto a great plain, he sees her world's future in all its brilliant horror.

Why she never should have acted.

Why she could have done nothing else.

Why what she has done will save so many others.

And that whether he had meddled or not she would have come to the same end. The road she took would have been a little different. That was all.

Because though there is no predestination, there are things that are meant to be.

"Dani," he asks suddenly, understanding at last. "Where is home?"

And she reaches out a hand, palm up, and holds it as if she would press it against his chest.

Only she can't, because he isn't really here.

Oh.

Not omniscient, and it's cost them both.

Earth was never home to him. He always felt like a stranger in his own world; one of the reasons he'd so eagerly embraced the study of the past. Later, he'd thought Abydos could be home. He'd loved Sha're with all his heart. But somehow love had not been enough, though it had been more - much more - than he had ever had before.

The Stargate Program - exploration, going through the Gate - and searching for Sha're - had filled his mind and distracted his heart from the pain of loss. When Sha're had died - _really_ died - he had faced the fact that he no longer had home or purpose or love.

Then he found Shifu, and began the road to Ascension.

The time will come - he sees that; it is a distant shining island of promise, though he does not yet see all the road that lies between - when he, like Orpheus, will have returned from the Underworld. He will be human again, and will have brought back from the land of more-than-death a gift.

Peace. Belonging.

For the first time in his life he will be certain of his place in the world. He will believe in home. His ghosts will be quiet at last, and when love comes to him, he will be able to accept it.

But Dani…

No Ascension, no Underworld journey. He had simply assumed that she, his mirror image, would be as tightly bound to her own world as he was - is - will be - to his.

But she isn't.

She isn't.

And that's why…

#

"Daniel," she says urgently, "don't-"

_Don't make the mistake you're about to make. Don't give Anubis the Eye of Ra._

But Daniel has gone.

She walks over to her desk and sits down.

'Where is home?' he asked her.

Daniel always seems to be asking her unanswerable questions.

Well, it's not that different than what he did when he was alive, is it?

Home is here, isn't it? Should be. Has to be. There's nowhere else she can go. Jack is here, and after all she's done - for him? - to get to him? - she doesn't want to leave him. She loves Jack O'Neill, and that much, no matter what Daniel has just told her, is a simple uncomplicated truth.

Even if she is not certain this is home.

She _was_ sure, until Daniel asked her. Whether it is or not, she will fight for it. She has fought to preserve many places that aren't her home. Jack has too. This is just one more.

She tries to imagine a universe in which Jack and Daniel both exist in the same place. Not a stretch; she's spent seven years in one. But that Jack O'Neill wasn't _her_ Jack; not the one who knew her from the first Abydos mission. The one who has cared for her when she was hurt. Stayed with her when she was sick.

That Jack O'Neill is not the one who sleeps beside her now in the night.

She wonders, sometimes, if Daniel would like Jack-here. What Jack would think of Daniel. It is a fantasy she uses to distract herself when the eschatological chessboard she lives upon becomes more than she can bear.

Abydos was destroyed because she went there. Because she meddled. The stakes are higher than she thought. For Daniel to speak to her at all is transgressive. He's done so at least twice, which means the conversations, no matter what they've sounded like, have been important. He's trying to tell her something, but he doesn't dare tell her straight out. For her sake. For his.

Walking a fine line. One he will cross six months from now on Abydos-there, when Jack tells him to.

They both, it seems, do what Jack tells them to.

And when he does, Abydos-there will end. Would end anyway; it's just that Daniel can't stop it. But because he tries, Daniel will be gone from Ascension. Lost to her even more than he is now. Restored to his friends.

Beginning another journey.

That ends in them losing each other.

_Goodbye and goodbye and goodbye._

But Abydos-here is gone now. Because of her. If she had not gone, it would have its today, its tomorrow. Weeks. Months.

But it is gone.

Goodbye to Abydos, a place that could have been home. Goodbye to Skaara, Kasuf, all of her friends, her family.

She saved Jack, Sammy, and Mr. T.

They have the Eye of Ra.

They have it, and The Other Side did not.

Another difference between the two universes. But one that has shown her the beginning of a disaster greater than she had ever imagined.

She is going to have to make a report to General Hammond.

What will she say?

Anubis is a half-Ascended being. He knows the sweep of the Universe, but cannot use what he knows. He came to Abydos when he did because of her.

Daniel told her from the first not to meddle. Now, having done so, she can claim to have caused the destruction of Abydos.

Worse, Anubis knows she knows the future and will use what she knows. He will watch her, using her as a pretext to use his own knowledge without being punished by the Ascended.

And now she knows that her marriage to Jack - her anchor - is a thing that has been somehow arranged by Daniel.

A gift to her, she knows. The only one he could give, across universes.

But she doesn't want Jack as a gift, even though she believes Daniel when he says he only made something happen sooner that would have happened - by itself - eventually.

She wonders if he caused it because he knows she does not have 'eventually.'

And no matter how much truth she plans to tell, this is something she cannot imagine telling Jack.

_One step forward, two steps back…_

She wonders if what the Furlings actually want is for her just to choose between universes.

She can't do that either.

Yesterday she knew. Today she doesn't.

She is no longer certain where home is.

#

A few minutes later Jack comes in.

"I came as soon as I could," he says. "Job."

The job comes first. She expects nothing else.

She has married - and loves absolutely - two men for whom the work comes first, which she supposes would be an interesting psychological study for MacKenzie, because on Atlantis, her work certainly came first, too. Before any form of 'playing house' - a concept with which she has only the most distant acquaintance.

Never got a chance to find out what being married on Earth would be like.

She's been married to Jack three weeks. The last two of which have been spent under house arrest - though she supposes you don't call it that on a military base thirty stories underground. She's never been to Jack's house as a bride. Possibly she never will.

And the job still comes first for her, because finding out what the Furlings want transcends nearly everything else in her mind. And now, she can add to that the discovery that she is playing some terrible game against Anubis for the right to use the Ascended knowledge he already has. How is she to use what she knows to stop him while preventing him from using what he knows to win?

Jack puts his arms around her. She settles against him, wanting to tell him without words that she's okay - or as okay as you get under circumstances like these. She wishes she could comfort him. He loved Skaara.

And he hates to lose.

She wishes she could go outside. Walk in the open air.

She's asked before. He's said no, but he won't tell her why. Sometime - not today - she'll push him until he explains. But she trusts him to keep her safe, so though she will push for an explanation, that's as far as she will go. There will be no walks in the open air.

And there are other problems she must give him to deal with. He will not thank her for delaying, no matter how much they both hurt. Her hands are on his back. She pats his shoulder, a warning that the subject - even if it is an unspoken subject - is about to be changed.

"I know why Anubis came when he did," she says against Jack's chest. "It was me."

"Indy- Dani- Don't-" Jack says gently.

"No, Jack. I'm not being stupid. Anubis isn't like the other _Goa'uld_. He's much worse. I thought there was time. I thought our world would run like theirs. I was wrong. It isn't going to."

"What are you saying?

She leans her forehead against his chest. And tells him as much as she knows about what Anubis is and how he wishes to use her.

#

They catch Sammy before she leaves the Base.

Dani's so tired she's babbling now - emotional exhaustion, shock, and no matter how much truth she tells, the one thing she can't bring herself to tell is that she saw Daniel again today, and what he confirmed to her - but Jack needs another kind of confirmation.

Sammy provides it, telling them that - in the esoteric world of physics - Time is just a suggestion. There are planes of Reality where it doesn't exist. If you could get there, Time could be laid out around you as if it were distance. You would see the near future sharply; the distant future vaguely. Maybe.

If - as she tells them - Anubis was there - in a place like that - and cast down again - he has as much knowledge of the future as Dani does. But a wider one.

"And a different one," Dani mumbles. Only coffee is keeping her conscious now. But it has to be done. They need to tell General Hammond something he'll understand in the debriefing tomorrow.

"Indy, tell me. What's he looking for?" Jack says.

"Oh, Jack, I think he may already know. But he doesn't dare act as if he does, because the Ascended will punish him. They'll destroy him. So he's waiting for me to lead him to it. Then he'll take it and use it." 

And if Anubis still has access to that place where he can see outside of Time…

Jack sighs in frustration. He strokes the back of her neck, gently. Sammy pretends not to see.

"That's why Daniel didn't want me to do anything," she says. "But he couldn't tell me why. Because the Ascended would punish him, too."

"Great folks," Jack says. "C'mon, Indy."

"All of the _Goa'uld_ have domains," she says, working her way slowly toward it. The unspeakable truth she's always known she was going to tell. "But in each of their domains they have a throneworld, the center of their power. Apophis's was Chulak. Earth was Ra's, for millennia. Baal is a very old and very powerful System Lord. He's ruled for millennia. He's as old as Ra, really. He's cunning. Too smart to challenge Ra directly. His name, you know, means 'Lord' in one of the oldest human languages; he was worshipped here even before Ra, I think…"

Neither Jack nor Sammy interrupts her.

"Baal's throneworld is a place called Dakara. It's sacred to all Jaffa. There's a huge temple complex there, as old as the _Goa'uld_ themselves. It's the place where the first Jaffa were created, which means it's the place to which the first humans were taken from Earth and made into Jaffa by the first _Goa'uld_ Queen, probably Baa'lat. It means 'Lady,' you know. Lord - Lady - their names are very old. They are truly ancient."

She's babbling. She doesn't want to get to the point.

"The _Goa'uld_ originally had Unas hosts. Some of them still do. They came to Earth in Unas bodies; that's why our legends are filled with tales of monsters and dragons. But they chose human hosts, and keep them still, because our bodies are so compatible with Ancient technology. Thousands of years ago they discovered a huge cache of Ancient technology - the Stargates, the rings, the sarcophagi - and have been looting and adapting it ever since. It's the keystone of their power. We're descended from the Ancients, you see. Almost fifty million years ago, there were humans on Earth. The Ancients. The Gatebuilders. They had a flourishing civilization. Then plague struck them - not only on Earth, their home, but everywhere in the Galaxy. Most of them died. A few of them learned to Ascend, and are still around.

"Knowing that they were going to die, they built a machine that would… restart evolution. Re-create them. It would take a few hundred thousand years, but it would re-seed life throughout the Galaxy, and evolution would take care of the rest. It's on Dakara. Baal has no idea that it's there. But it's capable of destroying everything in the Galaxy - all life - and starting it over again. That's what Anubis wants. He's going to re-create the Galaxy in his image, and rule over it."

"No more coffee for you," Jack says, after a pause.

"I don't understand why he doesn't just … take it," Sammy says. "You said he knows where it is."

"I'm not completely sure he does," she says. She's mumbling with exhaustion and the relief of finally having given up her horrible secret. "And even if he does, he can't use what he knows, because he learned it through Ascension. If he uses it, the Ascended will stop him."

"So all we have to do is take out this Ancient Doomsday Device and we're home free," Jack says comfortingly.

Tears spill down her face. "The Replicators are coming here. The _Goa'uld_ have the most advanced technology; the Replicators will attack them first, leaving Anubis free to do whatever he wants. They'll attack us too. And Daniel is the one who stops them, Jack. _Daniel."_

"And that is enough for tonight," Jack says. "Bed."

#

Carter's still in her lab when he gets back from taking Dani to her quarters. She's staring at a whiteboard covered with numbers. About what he expected.

She looks at him.

"Is it true, sir?"

He sighs. "Carter, I have no idea. She was right about Maybourne. She was right about that Eye doohickey. She was wrong about Anubis, and that cost us. But while I was bringing her back here from Palos Verdes, she told me every mission we'd been on for the past year, and there's no way she could have known any of that. Hell, Carter, when I found her, she couldn't have told you what day it was."

He sees Carter wince.

"I'm sorry, sir."

"We'll beat this, Carter."

"Yes, sir. The math… The implications are fascinating, sir."

"I'm sure they are. Go home, Carter. You can fascinate General Hammond in the morning."

"Yes, sir."

#

The silent treatment worked. Only took two weeks.

He sort of wishes it hadn't.

She'll fill in the gaps for them now. It won't be too hard to get her to do that now that she's told them this much.

He really doesn't like this Daniel guy at all.

Saved SG-1 on Kelowna. Became an 'Ascended Being.' Gave it up. Married Indy. Saved the Galaxy from the Replicators. Then came waltzing over to O'Neill's universe to fill Indy's head with some really bad advice.

Sounds like a real creep.

#

She isn't asleep when he lets himself in, though he left her in bed. _Put_ her in bed and told her to sleep.

She's damned bad at following orders.

She's sitting up in a chair in the corner. All the living room lights are out, but the bathroom light is on, showing through from the bedroom, and gives just enough light to pick out shapes; his night vision's still good.

"He was Ascended when he stopped the Replicators," she says when she sees him. She sounds sullenly angry.

"'Ascended' means dead, right?" Daniel Jackson would have to have died _again_ to do that, as far as O'Neill can work out the timetable. But he'd better keep track. Dani's got a nasty habit these days of trying to take things back and pretend she's never said them. You have to listen closely.

Because you can't - exactly - trust her.

It might not be fair, but he isn't in a mood right now to be fair. The mission went bad today and he's tired. And this is not an illustration of why there shouldn't be women in combat. It's an illustration of why you don't take your wife to the war. Of why they invented the Fraternization Regulations.

Because the two of them are the last people who should be anywhere near each other right now. And you can't transfer out of a marriage.

He should have gone home. To his other home. But that wouldn't be fair to her either.

All of his options right now just suck.

"How many times have _I_ died, Jack? Dead again. Yes. And came back. Again. And we lived happily ever after."

He's never heard her sound so bitter.

She gets to her feet. She's put on that nightgown she bought back in San Diego. She's never worn it before.

"That's everything, then," she adds. "All the high points. The variable we can't duplicate. The assistance of one of the Ascended. Happy now?"

"You seem to be. Want a drink to celebrate?"

She goes very still. It was a nasty thing to say. She was well on the way to being Town Drunk when he got to her. He's not sure how much of her sobriety now is incidental to being locked up under Cheyenne Mountain. But you fight for your sobriety wherever you are, whether you can get your hands on what you're hooked on or not.

They lost Skaara today. And Abydos. And it's hard not to wish that for just once in her life Dr. Danielle Jackson could have gotten her priorities straight and told them what they were facing _before_ she dropped them in the middle of it.

"I think you should go home, Jack."

"I _am_ home."

"No. I'm home. You should go to your home."

#

She says the words, and knows they're true, and something breaks inside, but somehow she's learned the art of crying without tears or sound. So nobody knows she's crying but her.

"Go home, Jack," she repeats. "Have a drink. It's been a long day." _You need to unwind. To forget this bad stupid marriage Daniel tricked us both into._

One more thing she knows she needs to explain, for the sake of playing fair. But not today. Not on top of Abydos.

"Just like that."

She's seen him in this mood, but rarely. Furious, unpredictable, and very quiet. She's not sure how they got here from the way they were in Sammy's lab, but in another sense, this is where they've been heading for weeks. They're going to fight - they're fighting now. It's probably going to be ugly enough to end their marriage, and she isn't even sure what they're fighting about.

"Just like that," she agrees.

He doesn't move. "Maybe before I go you can explain something to me. 'Cause I'm not as smart as you. Or Carter. Just how come it is that you didn't bother to mention all this good stuff about Anubis before we went to Abydos? You know, when it would have done some _good?"_

If she had.

If she'd thought it through.

Thought through what Anubis actually was.

She'd have known why Daniel didn't want her to meddle.

Some of the reason anyway.

"If I had, I would have realized we shouldn't go." Her level disinterested voice seems to belong to a stranger. "You would have stayed here. Anubis wouldn't have come. Skaara would still be alive. Then six months from now Anubis would come to Abydos anyway." She takes a deep breath. "I was going to tell you as soon as we got back."

"Not good enough," Jack says.

"No," she says. "I'm not. Not good enough to save Kelowna, not good enough to save Abydos, and not good enough to save the Galaxy."

"And this Daniel guy is," Jack says. Pushing.

It isn't a question, and it would actually be funny under other circumstances.

"He saved Kelowna and he saved the Galaxy. Several years ago. So he is - and I'm not."

"And married you."

The world is coming to an end, she's abandoned every principle she has to tell them the - _a_ \- future, she's so tired she may never sleep again, and the only thing that comes to mind just now is that Jack is jealous.

Which is ridiculous.

Angry with her because she didn't tell him about Anubis up front, yes.

Grieving over Skaara - who is still all tangled up with Charlie in his head - and unable to do anything but snarl, certainly.

Convinced now that marrying her was a bad idea - youth or even maturity having had its fling - and now panicking, she'll allow that as a theory.

But _jealous?_ Of _Daniel?_

"Yes, Jack, Daniel married me. You knew that Daniel married me. I told you. But not only is he dead, he's never even existed in this universe, and I don't know how much more nonexistent he can be."

"You remember him." Stating the obvious.

And not all that dead, since she talked to him just a few hours ago.

"I remember all the men I marry. I'll remember you."

He twitches slightly. She continues as if he's spoken.

"When we're divorced. Love and marriage, you know, don't have to go together. And this … you can't live in a hole in the ground, Jack. And I can't leave. Let's…"

"Go to bed. I'm tired."

#

She's actually rather sleep with a live hand grenade. Which she has done - they've all done - any time they've slept in their equipment vests.

It's more restful.

She's not entirely sure what they've just fought about. Or if they're finished.

He offered to get her drunk.

She's offered to divorce him.

Apparently he doesn't like Daniel. She wonders what he thinks Daniel must be - have been - will be - like.

Aside from being the man who was married to his wife.

Jack O'Neill, troglodyte.

A troglodyte determined that they are going to bed _now._ And so they do. She does not feel like a wife at the moment. She feels like an article of ordinance. Soothsayer, one, officers for the use of.

They take to their bed in silence.

Fortunately Jack has the military ability to fall asleep anywhere. And she has the neurotic ability to stay awake anywhere. All she has to do is breathe slowly and deeply and stay relaxed, and she won't wake him.

An error in judgment, and she's killed her brother, her father, everyone she knows on Abydos.

Shortened their lives, really. She can't - won't - take responsibility, really, for the ultimate fact of their deaths. She thinks Anubis would have killed them anyway, here as well as there. But she couldn't save them. That hurts. She'd hoped to.

If Anubis hadn't been waiting to pounce, if she had been able to get the Eye of Ra away from Abydos before he got there, maybe they would have been safe.

Or maybe he would have destroyed Abydos just for spite.

There is no way to be sure. As Teal'c reminds them, over and over, the _Goa'uld_ are _evil._

But her family is dead, and it hurts.

She failed, and it hurts.

Daniel came to her and told her that the only thing she can depend on - loving and being loved by Jack - is somehow a lie.

And what hurts in quite another way - and she knows from experience that the small pains are the sharpest - is that Jack seems finally, now and forever, to have lost all patience with her.

No one, seeing the two of them together, would have imagined that he had - or that she noticed - his patience. His forbearance, as she (a) flouted (b) bent and (c) totally ignored military customs, protocols, and regulations. But she did. He put up with so damned much from her. She'd been the bull in the military china shop for years. And then she'd left.

And then he came to Palos Verdes. And they'd settled back into the same routine. Like a long-married couple.

So to speak.

Of course, nothing she'd done or failed to do had ever killed thousands of people before. And Jack had loved Skaara.

She supposes she has now managed to successfully do what she'd tried - inadequately - to do before. She's alienated Jack completely. Only she'd wanted to do it then - there'd been a point to it then - and now she needs him.

No.

She won't fall into that trap.

How many times has she said that? And everyone she's said it of has either died or left. Or sometimes, through feats of metaphysical gymnastics, both.

The point is not to care, as T. E. Lawrence once said in quite another context.

Can it, she wonders, actually be this easy?

Can she not care?

She has - being entirely precise - failed, through inability, to save two planets now.

Maybe it's time to give up. To just stop caring.

Odd, that between them Jack and Daniel have made this possible.

Heartbreaking.

When your heart breaks, you're supposed to die. Fairy tale logic. She's studied enough fairy tales to know, but she's found no answers there, either.

The universe is going to end - that's one track of the puzzle - and she doesn't know why the Furlings have done this to her - that's another.

Unless they just want to watch.

#

She concentrates on being still. She aches for sleep, but that would involve movement and dreams, and either might wake him. God knows the man needs his sleep. And she needs the silence.

So. Stillness.

There are different kinds of stillness; she catalogues them all. The stillness of waiting in ambush. The stillness of waiting in hiding. Both listening for the sound of the approaching enemy.

She listens to the sound of Jack's breathing and tries not to care. But he has been her touchstone since she was twenty-five years old. She will be forty soon. It does not matter what Daniel has done to either of them. She loved Jack - this Jack - on The Other Side and loves him here.

Stillness.

The stillness of injury, being trapped inside your own body by paralysis or damage or disease.

Or madness.

She has experienced all these.

The stillness of contemplation, of rapt study of some object that draws the consciousness from itself, until the body seems to be nothing but an inconvenience. The moment of its rediscovery, on the indrawn breath too long delayed, seeming always so … improbable.

The stillness of death.

She has died. Has felt her heart give a final pulse and known there will not be another beat to follow. Has felt her body cool, strained to see as vision dimmed, tried to breathe when her lungs would simply no longer work.

Many times.

Any of them could have been the last. And though so many of those deaths were surrounded by shouting, by noise, when one is dying there is still a quality of stillness. And some of her deaths have been very quiet.

Jack has always said she could never keep still. Or quiet. He used to tease her about it.

She closes her eyes - she had been staring into the dark, timing her breaths - and her eyes ache as fiercely as if she had filled them with salt.

_You should see me now._

But when he looks, she knows that what he'll see is that she didn't tell him what she knew until too late to save Abydos.

Nothing could have saved Abydos.

Nothing can save them. Him and her. The Galaxy.

She's tried the only thing she could think of and it didn't work.

Not good enough.

If the world were just, or fair, or kind, she would have been the one who died in the Gate Room today, not Skaara. Then her brother and her husband would mourn her. Mourning is kinder than hate. It heals and it ends. Hatred feeds on itself and grows.

Will Jack bother? He's usually more efficient than that. She's the one who hates. He'll probably only go as far as contempt. They can live with that. It won't break up the team, because they're not a team any more. If she can get through the debriefing tomorrow, General Hammond will have everything she knows - not everything that happened on The Other Side, but the details of the endgame. Anubis. Dakara. The Replicators.

Daniel.

Interesting to think that the fate of the universe depends, in the end, on whether her parents had a boy or a girl. But that seems to be what it comes down to.

She wishes the world were merely interesting.

Jack tricked her, when he came to Palos Verdes. She thought that, when he came, nothing would hurt as much any more. Because, no matter what, he'd be there. She'd know what happened to him.

Surprise. She knows nine years - eight now - of the world's future and it can still do things she doesn't expect.

It can make Jack's presence hurt worse than his absence.

It can make her wish she'd never known what happened to him.

He rolls over just then and puts an arm around her, pulling her in close and then settling in back more deeply to sleep. His chin rests against her head, and his breaths ruffle her hair, tickle her skin.

She only wishes it didn't give her hope. Make her feel safe. Make her stop counting and thinking and cataloging degrees of stillness and spiral down into the dark oblivion of sleep at last.

#

He comes halfway awake in the night and feels her beside him, vibrating with tension. He's just aware enough to know that that's not good. It's been a bad day. They both need to sleep. He reaches out, putting an arm around her, settling her body against his.

Goes back to sleep.

#

In the morning, he's awake before she is. She's burrowed up against him. He can see her perfectly well; the living-room lights have come up. They're on a twenty-four hour timer - some of them come on at 'dawn' and go off at 'dusk.' It's one of the things the psychologists have designed to keep people from completely losing it when they have to spend weeks cooped up over a mile underground.

He turns on the bedside light. That won't wake her either. Nothing will, short of coffee or incoming weapons fire.

She looks bruised. Dark circles under her eyes. She's frowning in her sleep.

She tried to throw him out last night. Talked about a divorce. He's not sure how serious she was about that, or where it came from.

She told him she made a bad call taking them to Abydos.

It wasn't her call. It was his. And General Hammond's.

And it was just bad intel. She's said over and over that both universes are supposed to run just the same. Last night she said that she wasn't expecting Anubis to show up for another six months, because that was how it went down on in The Other Reality. 

It should have been a cakewalk.

It wasn't, and there's no point in blaming anybody now. Over and done. Time to move on.

He gets up, puts on a robe. Goes to make coffee.

Ought to think about some things. Either moving in here to the tune of more than just a few changes of clothes, or twisting Hammond's arm and getting her moved out. She's come clean now, or will have after the morning debrief. They should be able to work something out.

He leaves a cup of coffee on the nightstand for her. Goes to shower.

#

When he comes out the cup is gone and so is she. She's in the living room, curled up in a chair. Wrapped in yards of trailing white chiffon and looking ready for a fight.

"Morning," he suggests.

"You'll want the rest of the story now. Before the debrief."

From the tone of her voice, he doubts it. He goes through to the kitchenette, pours himself another cup of coffee, comes back. He recognizes that tone and that look, though. It's her snake-baiting look, the one she gets when she's facing down System Lords and US Senators. The one that usually ends up with her being clubbed to the ground or dragged off somewhere, at least in the case of the snakeheads. And it's way too early for this, but if there's one thing yesterday has taught them, it's that putting things off has too high a price tag.

"Dani, if this is about Abydos-"

"Yes. And no. You'd get there eventually, so we're going there now. You being such a big fan of full disclosure. I only found out yesterday. After we got back from Abydos, so you'll be pleased to know that I'm telling you reasonably quickly. It's all been a lie from the beginning. I suppose from the moment you got to Palos Verdes. What you did. I suppose he was there. Oh, not what I said. But that I said it. A bit of a fine distinction there. The truth is that he meddled. With you. Me. Us. He used his powers to make us do things we wouldn't have done. He says he just helped us do them sooner than we would have. Who knows? Personally, I think you'd have come to your senses before descending to my level. But there's still time."

He's not sure what she's talking about.

"Going to have to be a little clearer than that."

She smiles. It's a lethal expression. People always underestimate her. Her ability to face a tough situation and not flinch. To do what she has to. To pull the trigger when she has to.

Even to do what she did to herself in Palos Verdes because she thought she had to.

She raises her coffee cup in mocking salute.

"Daniel will still be an Ascended Being until Abydos is destroyed on The Other Side. I saw him yesterday. The rest? Let me spell it out. He manipulated both of us with the powers granted him by Ascension. He said so. Our marriage is the result."

He stares at her. Not wanting to believe it, but knowing that she isn't lying, whatever else may be true. He sits down.

She knew last night. No wonder she was talking about divorce.

He doesn't know how he feels at all.

How can this Daniel guy be anything like Dani? He can't imagine Dani ever doing anything like that. It's dishonest.

"And you married this guy," he says in disgust.

She shakes her head slightly. "No. I've never met this Daniel. He'll Descend. Two years later we'll meet for the first time. That he knows me now is Ascended omniscience."

"So he just popped up and told you he fried my brain, to make me-"

He won't say the words, though he thinks them, looking at her sitting there swathed in bridal gauze and lace. He is thinking nothing decorous, nothing bridal. Nothing worthy of an officer and a gentleman, which Colonel Jack O'Neill is supposed to be.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I have no idea."

"Guess."

"To make me happy. To keep me from doing what I've been doing: telling you about The Other Side. To make me do something else, maybe, but I don't know what. Maybe all three. And he's failed again."

She gets to her feet, sets down her cup. Regards him steadily.

"After the debrief I'll go to my office. You can pack your things then. I don't want you here any more."

#

She wants him more than she wants to breathe. More than she wants to see the sun again. But he's lost faith in her. And how does she know - how could _he_ know - that what they've had was real to begin with, and not something created by Daniel's meddling?

She walks into the bedroom, goes to her closet to find the uniform of the day. Her peignoir floats out behind her. Stupid to have worn it. Stupid to have bought it at all. The first thing she'll do when she gets back here tonight is take a pair of scissors and cut it and the nightgown into very small pieces.

They're bad luck.

"You're my wife," Jack says, following her.

He's never known when to leave an argument alone.

"We can fix that." She finds the items she wants and tosses them on the bed.

"That what you want?"

"I don't want you here. You have a home, and this isn't it."

And they're back at last to the beginning of the argument - if it is an argument. The place they started last night, or very early this morning.

"I can talk to General Hammond," he says quietly.

About letting her out of here? About taking her home - his home? She knows now that Anubis wants her. There are _Goa'uld_ agents in the Trust, and the Trust and the NID is still closely intertwined. If she is still safe from the _Goa'uld_ on Earth, she won't be for much longer.

She's just told him that everything he feels for her is an illusion. Why is he doing this to her?

She shakes her head, refusing - though she's not sure what she's refusing - and goes to dress.

#

When she comes out she expects him to be gone, but he isn't.

"Indy. A mission went bad. That's all."

A mission went bad because of who she is and what she didn't say.

They are married because of what Daniel did.

She shakes her head again - it's not just that - and starts to walk past him, out the door.

He puts out an arm to stop her, changing her direction, reeling her in. It isn't a violent gesture, but it shocks her. She stands under his arm, shaking with conflicting impulses: stay? Go?

"It wasn't your fault," he says firmly.

It was, though. He thought so yesterday. And Skaara is dead.

Charlie is dead all over again.

She wants to lay her head on his chest and rest. Forever.

A presumed liberty based on a false premise.

"And this?"

She knows his body. His touch. Expects them. And she shouldn't.

"Can't all have been him."

She doesn't know if - on her side - any of it was Daniel. Unless his contribution was to make her blind to the consequences of recklessly taking what she wanted so much.

"And you'll never know. So we make it go away," she says. She has to whisper to keep her voice even. "I'll change my schedule. We'll never see each other after today. We can do this, Jack."

She hears him laugh, just a little. "Not one of your better plans, Indiana. How 'bout we both say we were both tired last night and said some things we didn't mean. Now come on. Breakfast. Carter and T are probably holding our usual table. And then we go explain all that science stuff to General Hammond."

#

One of Jack's great strengths is his ability to ignore things.

She's seen him ignore bullet wounds, broken bones, impending disaster, and unfolding disaster, simply behaving as if they didn't exist.

And now he's behaving as if yesterday and this morning simply didn't happen.

He says she's smart. She knows she is. That's fine. But smart, even brilliant, isn't all that rare. Pretty common, really. A solid one percent of the population makes the rest look like chimps. That's a pretty large number, statistically.

But the combination of skills that Jack O'Neill has are even rarer than hers.

Sammy could crunch the numbers and come up with the statistical occurrence of Jack O'Neills in the social matrix, but she's not sure Sammy understands. Sammy isn't a cultural specialist.

Jack made the Asgard sit up and take notice. The _Asgard._ She can talk to Thor. Jack _charms_ him.

Put Jack in any situation that needs to be survived, and he will.

Give him a military objective, and he'll achieve it. Whether, she's come to believe over the years, it's achievable or not.

The trouble - their trouble, down through the years - has always been that he's military and she's civilian. So he does and wants military things, and she's never thought they were appropriately important.

It doesn't mean that she doesn't understand that Jack is something far more special than she is. And he'd laugh himself sick to hear her say so.

This ability to just … ignore … what's just happened, for example.

Even if it's an act, it's a very good one. She's always envied him this ability. She's good at reading people, and the act - if it is one - is seamless.

Of course, when he doesn't want to be read at all, she can't.

But there's a certain difference between just shutting down and setting aside - as he seems to have done - the fact that he's been told that while he thought he was in love with a woman, it's really just a case of having had his mind manipulated.

Again.

For her it's different. She loves Daniel and trusts him, even if she's not all that happy with him at the moment. And she knows she loved Jack even before anything Daniel did, and precisely how, and how much.

But Jack.

He might have loved her. A lot. A little. Conditionally. In a way that would never have led to an offer of marriage. Or even to having sex.

She'll never know. He won't either. Nor is he likely to believe anything she has to say about her own feelings.

So she might as well say nothing at all.

Though she does think, sitting in the commissary, watching him banter aimlessly with Sammy and Mr. T—

As if Abydos was not destroyed yesterday—

As if Skaara did not die yesterday—

As if he did not spend the night and morning arguing with her, and discover his marriage is based upon a lie--

As if they do not have yet to find a way out of the destruction of the Galaxy—

That she loves him more than she can imagine loving anyone. That she has never been, and never will be, what he deserves.

That she will love him until the day she dies. And beyond, if that is possible.

"Eat your waffles," Jack says.

#

The Abydos debriefing starts out simply enough: what happened on Abydos is simple and straightforward, and she can get through her part of it easily enough, even on only a few hours' sleep. Most of it is Jack and Sammy's territory, anyway.

Then they get to 'why' and it becomes her territory.

General Hammond finds the explanation hard going. Sammy blinding him with science, while soothing, isn't really helpful either.

"So Anubis can _also_ see the future?" General Hammond says. "And that's why he was at Abydos when you were? Why didn't you tell us this earlier?"

"Yeah, ah, well, General, we were sort of planning on doing that when we got back. It's not like we we're expecting tall dark and spooky to jump the gun," Jack drawls.

"When you think about it, sir, it's actually pretty exciting that he was there," Sammy says. "His arrival on Abydos is six months earlier than his appearance in the timeline Dani knows. And there, he gained possession of the Eye of Ra, while here he didn't. Every time we make a change of that nature, we shift our reality farther away from the one Dani visited. Eventually, we may shift it far enough to, well, actually, we _don't_ want to make our outcome different from their reality. But we'll need to reach the same outcome - a stable, _Goa'uld_ -and-Replicator-free future - by a different path. Certain essentials need to remain the same: the Replicators have to be destroyed; Anubis needs to be denied access to the Ancient technology at Dakara. But how we achieve those goals may be very different. In fact, it's going to _have_ to be, given what Dani's already told us."

"Dr. Jackson?" General Hammond asks.

"Major Carter is correct, General," she says formally.

They've played this game before. Bouncing the conversation around the table. Keeping General Hammond just a little off-balance until they tell him everything they need him to know. It's like bull-leaping. Sort of. The coordination. The timing. Her team is covering for her - still - and it fills her with a fierce intense joy.

"We need to reach the same outcome - our survival - but we can't take the same path. Our variables are different. It's impossible for us to duplicate theirs. In the timeline I remember, by the time Anubis weakens the _Goa'uld_ by consolidating all power in himself, the Replicators break out of Ida, come here, and attack them. Anubis is free to take Dakara and attempt to use the Ancient-built machine there to wipe out all life in the Galaxy so that he can start over, essentially re-creating Life here in his own image. The Replicators on Dakara come through the Stargate to Earth and infest the SGC. The machine on Dakara can also be used to destroy the Replicators, too: that's what they did in the Alternate Universe, wiping out all the Replicators in our Galaxy. Destroy the Ancient machine, and Anubis can't use it, but the Replicators may win. Leave it intact, and Anubis has the weapon he wants.

"Now the reason they didn't win - there - is that the Replicators - everywhere … paused … at a critical moment. Long enough for Sammy - Sam - and Selmak to finish recalibrating the device on Dakara to wipe out the Replicators. Baal was helping them: he may be a _Goa'uld_ , but he didn't want to be a dead _Goa'uld_ , and they needed his Gate-activating virus to fire the weapon simultaneously through every Stargate in the Galaxy at once. They were about to be overrun by the Replicators - on Dakara and on Earth - when the Bugs just … stopped. Just for a few moments. And that gave Sam and Selmak time to finish and fire the Ancient weapon, and then the Bugs were gone.

"They stopped because Daniel Jackson, my quantum double - who was linked to the Replicator hive-mind at the time - stopped them, using powers gained through Ascension. Of course, with the Replicators gone, the machine was still intact and Anubis still had his fleet. But before Anubis could get to Dakara, he just vanished.

"Daniel said he wasn't responsible for Anubis' disappearance, but he never did explain fully. And the only power in the Galaxy that could stop Anubis was one of the Ascended, and at the time Anubis vanished, Daniel was Ascended, again. He'd been a prisoner of the Replicators, and he died - Ascended - when they were destroyed. So if he didn't do it himself, he talked someone among the Ascended into doing it while he was, well, um, _there."_

The others are looking at her with various expressions of incredulity and disbelief, and she admits the story, while being the simple truth, deserves it. Sammy looks the most indignant, possibly because Other Sam is involved in the story. Mr. T looks more curious than anything else, and also faintly miffed: Dakara is a holy place for the Jaffa. General Hammond looks aggrieved, even though he's the one who wanted to be told all this.

And Jack just looks bland and faintly pleased, as if this is nothing more than entertainment and he's arranged it.

"I … see …" General Hammond says. "And without the assistance of these … Ascended?"

They're all going to die.

"We'll figure out something else, General," Jack says easily. "If we help the Asgard take out the Replicators before they leave Ida, we only have Nubie to worry about. If we can get rid of the tinkertoy on Dakara, it's not going to matter what he knows."

"We'll start from there. Dr. Jackson, I'd like a complete report covering everything you can remember about the device on Dakara. And anything else that might be useful."

"I'll do my best, General." It's going to be tough to reconstruct the Dakara site from her memory alone, and she's not sure she can draw an accurate sketch of the machine itself at all, but she'll try.

"Very good. SG-1, Dr. Jackson, dismissed."

She's expecting it by now - to hear herself spoken of as separate from SG-1 - but it still hurts.

#

She goes to her office. Her new office. There's nothing there but her books. No artifacts. She isn't working on anything SGC-related. The place looks rather stark.

As stark as her apartment did on The Other Side, and for much the same reason.

The poet's creation measured out his life in coffee spoons. She measures out hers in paired sets of asymmetric mirror images. Like the symbolic ritual tableaux the Furling use for communication with the … lower orders.

Maybe this is Furling communication and she's just too blind to see it. That her work has become as irrelevant as her personal life once was? Now there's a frightening thought. Take away her work and there's nothing left of Dr. Jackson at all.

She settles down - as far as possible - to do General Hammond's bidding. Though much of her mind is focused on the fact that Jack will surely be, at her behest, using this time to eradicate himself from her quarters.

And another part of her is fixating on how her team - no longer her team, but, still, somehow, always will be - covered up for her … lapse … in the briefing today. Would it have made a difference if they'd known in advance what Anubis is? Anubis isn't immune to the laws of physics, after all. If he'd been on the other side of the Galaxy when they stepped through, they could have been to Abydos and gone again before he got there.

Of course, being partially-Ascended, Anubis has a certain advantage. His information is ongoing, not fixed in past acquisition, like hers. It wouldn't matter what she did. He could change his plans to match it.

True or not?

She doesn't know.

She makes a note.

But if Anubis knows all that much, he knew the trick she was going to pull with the Eye of Ra. And it still worked.

Why?

She smiles.

Because he could know it, but he couldn't tell Herak _what_ he knew.

Anubis knows, but he can't tell.

She knows, and she _can_ tell.

And has.

Daniel said … oh, she can't remember anymore. Just that he didn't suggest trying to change the future. Something like that.

But since whether she tells or not the universe is going to end anyway five years from now at the outside, she's decided she can't see the point in silence any longer. Her universe is spinning into disastrous divergence from Daniel's anyway. Maybe they won't have the Replicators to deal with at all. Anubis is bad enough.

She tries to tell herself that.

Knowing that the truth is something else.

That her only defense from Anubis had been silence, and doing nothing.

In forfeiting that, she has made herself visible to him.

He is free to act upon that if upon nothing else.

#

The briefing lasted from ten till noon. She works through lunch and on into the afternoon, blocking out the preliminary stages of what will be several lengthy reports and lists. She's deeply involved when Jack walks in.

He looks unsettled. As if he has something on his mind. She isn't thinking much farther ahead at the moment than dinner, and then an early night in her undoubtedly-solitary bed.

The first of many solitary nights.

Considering the death and destruction she's just survived and is anticipating, the fact that she'll be sleeping alone is a small matter in the scheme of things. Not worthy of complaining about. And she isn't going to complain. But it hurts.

She should be used to pain by now.

"We need to talk," Jack says.

She's talked enough, she thinks. Too much. Not enough. Said the wrong things.

"Oh sure. Why not? What else can I say to entertain you?"

It's not quite the reaction he was expecting. He's always somehow in motion; jittering in place; fiddling with something. He stops completely for a moment.

"You weren't at lunch."

"Busy, busy." And she's down to one gym session a day, and she intends to blow that off tonight, too.

"Look, I… what exactly did he … _say?"_

There's only one 'he' and she knows what Jack wants to know. He's pacing around her office now, picking things up and putting them down. In the old days there'd be a lot more to fiddle with - her office was crammed full of artifacts and work in progress. Now it's pretty sterile in comparison. Nothing here but books.

"Does it really matter?" she asks.

Jack slams down the book he's holding with a violence that makes her jump. But when he speaks, though his voice is vehement, he doesn't yell.

_"He did something to me and I want to know exactly what it was."_

She takes a deep breath. Nods. What she tells him won't make him any happier with her. Or Daniel. But there's no way he can get at Daniel, and she's right here.

"He said he helped us both see things clearly. That's all he said. I accused him of setting us up - talking to myself, really - then I saw he was there. He said we would have done it eventually, I said, so because of him we did it now, he said he just helped us see things clearly and we did all the rest … you have _no_ idea of how elliptical conversations with the Ascended are. Then he asked me where I was living, I tried to warn him about not making a deal with Anubis, and he vanished. You arrived, we went to talk to Sammy, that was pretty much my evening. And yours?"

Jack looks … not puzzled, exactly, but as if he's working something out. Something she can't figure out.

"So he didn't exactly _do_ anything."

"Aside from make you lose your mind, Jack, no. I'm not sure how the Ascended would define 'helping us see things clearly.'"

He raises an eyebrow. "You?"

"Sorry, feel all normal here. Which I suppose is the whole point. But I don't, you know, feel any different than I felt five years ago, or ten years ago. Or fourteen years ago, which, if you're struggling with the math, takes us right back to the first Abydos mission."

"I was married then."

"You were."

"You stayed on Abydos."

"I had family there."

"I thought about you after I came back. After Sara … left. Wasn't in love with you, though."

"Reassuring."

"Or when I brought you back from Abydos. Or when we went to Chulak."

"Going to list all the places where you weren't in love with me, Jack? Should I guess when the penny dropped? Land of Light? That virus we brought back? You tried to jump me in the Control Room."

He grins at her, the way he always has when he's managed to catch her out at something.

"You'd be wrong. If you go by that, _Carter's_ in love with me. By then I wanted you. Not love. No, it was, say, a year after that. We all went to that water planet and you got kidnapped by that fish-guy."

She has to think hard for a moment. "Nem? On Oannes?"

"Whatever. And _he_ screwed with our minds, and we all thought you were dead. Hammond even had us close out your apartment. All I could think of was we'd just set you up in it not too long ago and it was pretty damned obvious it was the first real place you'd ever had. And I was standing there, realizing that I'd made all kinds of plans. And you weren't going to be around for any of them. So - later on - I took a hockey stick and smashed out all the windows in General Hammond's car."

At the wake Jack held for her at his house. Sammy told her about it afterward.

"But I wasn't dead. You came and found me."

"And Hathor nearly killed you a few weeks later."

"And you, Jack. And when she came back again - later - and kidnapped the three of us, she stuck a snake in your head. And you killed her, and you will never know how damned happy I am that you did. So now we've covered some personal history, revisited a few near-death experiences, and I should really get back to work."

"Dani."

She stops and waits. She can't help it. Some habits are far too ingrained to break.

"I didn't marry you because he made me. And I'm not leaving because we've had a fight. That's all this is. Sara and I used to fight all the time. Didn't you and Daniel fight? When you were married?"

She looks at him blankly. She and Daniel never fought. What would they have had to fight about?

He's never actually asked her about Daniel - alive - before.

"We were in Atlantis," she says, as if that's an explanation. "It's in Pegasus Galaxy. An intact Ancient city. His specialty was the Ancients, and I wasn't that bad at Ancient by then. Five years after…. And, well, transfers and budget cuts at the SGC; the people I knew were all gone and then Daniel was leaving. So we got married so I could go with him."

"Romantic."

She sighs. "I never was that bright about some things. I married him because he was going and they wouldn't split up married couples. Because he wanted me with him and I didn't want to be … alone. He suggested it because he loved me and he knew that if he mentioned love he'd spook me. It took me another six months to figure it out."

"And you were doing him for how long?" Jack, sounding disbelieving.

She grins. She supposes it's not very elevated of her, but she thinks it's funny too. "Four years before we married," she says, shrugging apologetically. "It took me a whole three years and visual aids on The Other Side to figure out about you and me, Jack, and that was just to figure out that _I_ loved _you._ I still didn't know what you felt. It's funny, because I could tell how _that_ Jack and Sam felt about each other, but they, you know…. When I… We'd just gotten back to Earth from Atlantis. We'd just gotten home. And the Furlings sent me here. Back here."

She puts her head in her hands, mumbles through her fingers. "We _tried_ to figure out why they sent me there in the first place. We never really did. We always thought it was about communication, but they've never tried to communicate. And I _hate_ super-powerful alien nutcases."

"And that would be like … the Ascended?"

"I wish he hadn't told me," she says simply, still not looking up. Quietly. "I was happy with you when I didn't know. But really … I was the one who told him. Accused him."

Jack waits, saying nothing.

"Marry me? _You?_ Not without divine intervention. Or as close to it as we're likely to get. Married to you… It was … more … than nice. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized you would never… Something had been done to you, so—"

"No."

It's quiet, but it stops her.

"I didn't marry you because he made me. It was… I went down there and found you. And…"

He's never been one to discuss his feelings. Or analyze them. Or, for that matter, articulate them. He can analyze other things than feelings, quickly and well. He can talk about tactical situations precisely and to the point. Skewer policy. Depress pretension. Cut to the chase.

Give encouragement to those under his command when the mission has done what missions so often do.

He's kept her alive.

Through love and war and marriage.

"Okay," she says.

He went to Palos Verdes and saw her and Daniel did whatever he did. And Jack asked her to marry him.

And she said yes.

Because 'Now' is the only time there is.

Maybe all that Daniel did was remind them both of that.

"So what do we do, Jack?"

Because she has no idea. Certainly their marriage is legal, but she isn't sure whether it should count, or be allowed to, or whether it should be ignored, or made to go away. Is there conceivably some way for her to invoke Daniel and make him undo what he has done to Jack? Would Jack believe her if she told him Daniel had?

"Would he lie to you?"

"What?" The question shocks her.

"Would Daniel lie to you?" Jack repeats patiently. "Ascended or not?"

"No. Never." They never lied to each other. _Never._

"Then we would have done this eventually," Jack says.

It seems to settle the matter for him.

"When we were old and grey?" she suggests.

"Better now."

He sits down on the edge of her desk.

"So. Anubis. What do we have, and what do we need?"

He's asked that question in a hundred different contexts. Basic survival training.

She does love Jack O'Neill.

She takes a deep breath. One subject closed. Another open.

"We have - we think - an idea of what Anubis intends to do, and what he needs to do it. We know he can't use whatever he may know without a … pretext. I'm one. There may be others; in fact, we _know_ there are, because in the Other Reality, he does eventually act. We have knowledge of a number of important events over the next eight years, both here and offworld, plus information on the location of a number of offworld artifacts that might help us beat him. For good or bad, a lot of that information is going to … shift … once we start using it. What I know won't change. What Anubis knows will change, because he's half-Ascended. We need… to stop the Replicators before they reach our Galaxy. And to neutralize the Ancient machine at Dakara before Anubis can use it."

"Ah. Business as usual, then?"

"Pretty much."

"Going to be a pretty long report."

She looks back at her computer screen and sighs. A very long report.

"Don't skip dinner."

"I'm going to need access to the dialing computer," she says absently, her mind elsewhere again.

"I'll tell General Hammond. Dinner?" He reaches out one finger, taps her lightly under the chin to get her attention.

"What?" She looks at him, blinking.

"It's that meal that comes after lunch."

"Jack-"

"Which you skipped."

"Yeah, I know, but-"

"Which means you should come and eat something now."

"But I-"

"Coffee break. Pie."

Once pie has entered the discussion, no further argument is possible, she knows from experience. She sighs, shaking her head, and closes the file. Follows him to the commissary.

All right. The world is still going to end. She still sees no way out of that. But Jack isn't worrying about it right now apparently. And in certain special and unique ways, he is _way_ smarter than she is.

So she goes and eats pie.

And because he's smarter than she is, he hasn't moved his things out of Isolation Quarters.

But she _is_ smart enough not to cut up the peignoir set.

#

Time passes.

She hasn't been let to go through the Gate again since Abydos. They don't dare let her. If she's right in her analysis - and Anubis gets his hands on her - he'll have everything he needs to act.

Jack asks, but General Hammond doesn't dare permit her to go outside The Mountain, either. With the price Anubis undoubtedly has placed on her head, anyone - any _Goa'uld_ , and undoubtedly others as well - would be happy to turn her over to him, not knowing that Anubis's endgame means the destruction of everyone. And based on what she's told them, they have to believe that there are _Goa'uld_ on Earth, or will be at any moment. The risk is too great.

But she has better quarters now. A larger suite, with a study for her and a den for Jack, because joined at hip and heart or not, she still won't watch _The Simpsons._ And Jack has moved a lot of his things from the cabin here. Furniture. Pictures. Just about everything he owns, truth to tell. This is where he lives, because she can't live anywhere else. But it's a real home, though a strange one. She's no longer a prisoner of any sort. More of a refugee.

He hasn't put the cabin on the market, though. It's an unspoken promise. They'll live in his house - _their_ house - once they've won, and it's safe at last.

They fight.

Nothing in her life has prepared her for the sheer intimacy of their arguments. She and Daniel never fought. Squabbled over work, yes. Constantly. Barely. And when she was on SG-1, she and Jack argued up one side and down the other over policy and tactics and methods. She called him a troglodyte, he called her a geek, and the arguments were essentially impersonal.

Violent.

Professional.

A courtship.

The arguments they have now are incredibly personal.

Or perhaps _intimate_ is the better term.

Because unlike her and Daniel, they are still learning each other. They do not have an identical past to draw upon. There are things about each other they will simply never know. Never tell. Never admit.

But there are very few things that are off-limits, because Jack has never been a fan of kid-glove treatment - giving or receiving - and neither has she.

So they fight. And make up. And go again. Nothing earth-shattering. Just a marriage, slowly being built. It's odd that they have to learn each other all over again, but the unwritten rules have changed. He's not her team leader. She's not under his command. Replacing that is what they've always had. Respect. Trust. A certain amount of taking on faith.

She's almost back to her old routine. Translations, briefings of the other SG Teams, long hours in her office - that's pretty much the same - though trying to find a way around Anubis is always first priority. Sometimes, for an hour, maybe two, she can pretend her life hasn't changed at all. Sometimes she can even forget which side of the mirror she's on. Which lover she's waiting for at the end of the day.

Being married to Jack is different than being married to Daniel in every way, and that's good. Because she still misses Daniel constantly, and sometimes she forgets he's gone - or, more accurately, that she is - and thinks of something she wants to show him. Or tell him.

And she can't. And then having lost him hurts as sharply as if it's just happened. All over again.

She wonders if it always will.

She hasn't seen Daniel again since the day Skaara died. She suspects, though, that he sees her.

#

Six months after the Abydos mission her metaphysical polyandry ends. She's in her office. It's an ordinary day. As ordinary as her days get. SG-1 is offworld. She does her best not to worry about them, but Janet tells her she's getting an ulcer. The kind antibiotics won't touch. She's supposed to give up coffee. As if. The ulcer isn't from Jack's job. It's from hers. The real one. The highly-classified one. The one nobody knows about but General Hammond and Jack. Even the rest of SG-1 doesn't know all the details. It's safer that way.

She sits bolt upright, startled out of contemplation of a complicated translation - she's still the best at that, and everyone knows it - as if her name as just been called.

There's no one there.

But she has the strongest, strangest sense she's just missed an appointment. Or is late for something.

She checks her watch. Her calendar.

Nothing.

No.

Something.

Today SG-1 goes to Abydos on The Other Side.

She does not know the precise mission timetable there - second-by-second timetables were not in the mission reports she read - but she is certain that Daniel is gone. Has just gone.

Now.

Been taken.

Descended.

She is faintly surprised at how much it hurts, which is unreasonable, or, at the very least, ungrateful, when she has a flesh-and-blood husband who loves her, and whom she loves. She has said goodbye to Daniel every night for the past two years; this is hardly more final. And though he will Ascend again, briefly, she suspects they'll all be dead here before he does, because her chessgame with Anubis has not been producing … encouraging results.

_Goodbye, and goodbye, and goodbye._

She's doing her best. They all are. And it's a very good best.

Anubis is simply outthinking them. And the main events - the ones she thinks of as the important markers leading to his endgame - are still happening. She has not been able to stop them, though she has stopped, or changed others.

She's given them the address for Atlantis. She's given them the coordinates for Proklarush Taonas. They retrieved the ZPM from there to power the Ancient outpost under Antarctica, so they have a defense if they're invaded. They've gone to what would-have-been Maybourne's World, but the timeship wasn't there, so they couldn't retrieve the second ZPM from Ancient Egypt. But they're preparing the Atlantis Mission now; the power source that Jack built once with the aid of Ascended knowledge will allow them to fire up the Gate for just long enough; Sammy was able to reconstruct it. Elizabeth Weir will head the mission.

Senator Kinsey's connections to the Trust have been exposed. He will never be Henry Hayes' Vice President. Of course, without Kinsey's support, it is possible that Hayes will not become President, either. That might make matters worse for them, because Hayes will - would have - supported them. But Kinsey, left in power, could also force her to leave The Mountain and make an appearance in Washington. They can't afford the risk. Jack still has contacts from his Black Ops days. He's pretty sure she'd never make it back.

Chess.

They wanted to turn over the second Ancient database to the Asgard. It's what enables the Asgard to build the weapon that destroys the Replicators - or, actually, once Jack takes the download from the database, uses the weapons at the Ancient outpost in Antarctica to destroy Anubis' first invasion fleet at Earth, is frozen, has his consciousness downloaded into an Asgard computer, and acts as an interface between the Ancient database and the Asgard computers, _then_ the Asgard can build the weapon - before they repair Jack.

But none of that happens.

They go after the database. But they can't get to it in time. They send SG's -13 and -3 to simply remove the whole thing without activating it. Both teams are attacked on-site by an enemy they've never seen before. They're wiped out, but they manage to destroy the database before their position is overrun. The MALP sends back enough images for her to identify the attackers as Kull warriors, something they haven't encountered here before.

And Anubis doesn't attack Earth when he's supposed to. That might be a good thing. She knows it isn't.

They all know it's only a matter of time before Anubis is confident enough to attack Earth. And when he does come, he'll do so in sufficient force not to be stopped by the Antarctic defenses.

Even if they had a way to power them now.

He will take Earth to get to her, gaining the pretext to use the machine at Dakara one way or another. He can pretend he wants her in revenge for her taking the Eye at Abydos.

It is reasonable behavior from a _Goa'uld_. Personal revenge. The Ascended won't interfere.

And when he has made her a host - if he does - Anubis will know what she knows. And he will be able to use the machine at Dakara.

It is too well protected for them to destroy. It is deep in Baal's domain. They've run a hundred assault scenarios. Nothing works. Trying to either take or destroy Dakara is hopeless.

She saves some lives.

Janet's. Rya'c's. Bra'tac's.

A few others. They never know.

She's still not quite sure what the Furlings get out of this. Surely - if they built the quantum mirrors - they've been able to watch a hundred variations on her universe unfold already. Alternate-Janet said that the _Goa'uld_ conquer most of them. They're about to do it again here, in an even more final way. Why would the Furlings want to watch that again?

At least they haven't moved her. She's still here.

But to find herself in yet another unknown universe has become the stuff of her nightmares. To have familiar faces regard her without recognition. Those nightmares come when Jack is away. She works herself to exhaustion, then, unwilling to sleep. Hardly a baseless causeless fear, when the Furlings have moved her twice. But nothing she has any defense against, either.

Janet wants to give her pills to help her sleep. She finally has to explain to Janet why she doesn't dare take them. It would be so easy to rely on one more chemical crutch. She supposes - after Shylac's sarcophagus, after the _Goa'uld_ pleasure palace, after Palos Verdes - she's been hard-wired for addiction. She simply can't risk it.

The fear won't leave.

They have to either stop Anubis or destroy the machine at Dakara. They have no way of mounting an attack that deep into Baal's domain. They have to take out Anubis.

It takes her a year - from the destruction of Abydos - to come up with anything close to a viable plan.

#

"Jack, I have to go to Kheb."

Like so many of these conversations, they're having it in bed. She's not sure why it's easier to make outrageous statements like this in the dark, but it is. Well, at least she hasn't woken him up in the middle of the night this time. They've just turned out the lights.

Married a year and a month. An odd sort of married life. It doesn't matter. He's hers.

"Kheb is off-planet, Indy," he reminds her.

"Which is the point. It's Oma Desala's stronghold. She whacked some Jaffa there, on The Other Side, for starting up with her at her temple. I go there, Anubis makes a grab for me, she whacks him. Or… I learn a lot more about the Ascended, which could help."

Maybe she could Ascend. Or figure out a way to bring Anubis all the way back. Either way, they need more information about the Ascended, and Kheb is the only place to get it. She knows the address.

"And if Anubis grabs you?"

"Either he comes to Kheb and makes trouble - and gets in trouble - or he doesn't come to Kheb - and I'm safe. Jack, we've got to do _something."_

The Replicators have broken out of stasis in the Asgard Galaxy. Because of what she knows - and has been able to prevent - they're still led by Fifth, not by Evil Robot Sam, but still, the news from there is bad. The news here is not good either. Even without the Eye of Ra, the System Lords are falling to Anubis, one by one.

And they are running out of time.

What Washington sees is that the _Goa'uld_ threat is diminishing, since the System Lords are falling. It is hard to convince them that this is because Anubis is killing them, consolidating his power. Since Abydos, Anubis has not been visible, even to Tok'ra spies. He does not act against his fellow _Goa'uld_ directly.

There is talk of cutting the SGC budget by more than half. The money saved - billions - will go to build a spacefleet.

The Pentagon is confident in its spacefleet. She knows - they all know, here at the SGC - that it stands no chance against even an old-style _ha'tak_. Against what Anubis may build, augmented with the looted Ancient technology she knows he has, it stands even less.

The Asgard are busy with the Replicators. The Tollen won't fight Anubis on Earth's behalf. Neither will the Nox. At least she has warned them both, though she has not dared to tell them everything. What she tells them, Anubis will know. What he knows, he will use.

General Hammond has withheld the full scope of her information from Washington for the same reason. The NID would order her sent to Washington. She would disappear.

Only General Hammond and Jack know all she knows.

Their only hope of checkmating Anubis is to destroy either him or the Ancient machine at Dakara before he can use it. They cannot destroy the machine. They must destroy Anubis, playing upon his _Goa'uld_ arrogance to draw him into direct conflict with the Ascended. Perhaps the Ascended will finish the job this time.

Jack sighs. "I'll talk to General Hammond. In the morning."

#

General Hammond isn't wild about the idea. She makes her case calmly.

General Hammond doesn't like it, but he can't see any other answer either. For months she has proposed scenarios, but none of them are viable. They have to find one that will work before they run out of time.

He sends SG-4 to Kheb. They do a ten-kilometer sweep around the Gate. Not far enough to get to the temple, but enough to check the immediate area for hostiles. SG-4 is the Russian team - there's a new one every six months because Russia rotates them, and also because they have the highest mortality rate of any of the SG Teams. They're also the only SG Team issued with suicide pills. Janet hates that. They're Dani's special pets, though; she briefs them both in English and in Russian, assuring them it's to help keep her fluent. And not, god knows, because there's any possibility that any of them might not be one hundred percent bilingual in an arena where the tiniest misunderstanding of the information contained in a briefing could prove fatal.

They come back safely.

First hurdle cleared.

Next General Hammond sends SG-1 and -5 - without her. SG-1 will locate and confirm the presence of the temple. SG-5 will secure the Gate.

Neither team reports back.

Neither team returns.

#

General Hammond sends a MALP; he won't risk another SG Team without more information. The area immediately around the Gate is clear; the MALP does not have enough resolution to pick up footprints.

But a UAV overflight shows them signs of a running firefight, and the bodies of dead Jaffa scattered upon the ground about half a mile from the Gate. It shows them bodies hidden in the brush. Computer enhancement lets them identify them.

SG-5 is dead. SG-1 is missing.

Sammy, Teal'c, and Jack are in enemy hands.

They never made it to the temple.

#

General Hammond doesn't upbraid her. It was a theory, a gamble, a calculated risk. It was his decision, not hers. SG-4 reported the area clear.

It makes Jack's loss no easier to bear.

Her husband, her _Tau'ri_ sister, her Jaffa brother, as lost to her as her Abydan family.

And there is worse, though she is not sure General Hammond realizes it yet.

If Jack is not dead…

He was in every briefing she gave General Hammond about what she learned on The Other Side.

He's the one she's lain beside, in the dark, and asked her idle - and not so idle - questions of. Trying to find the answer that will save them.

Even if Anubis is not the _Goa'uld_ who has taken him, there is a price on Jack's head. On the head of every member of SG-1. On hers. Whoever has them will sell them to Anubis.

If Anubis knows what use he can make of Jack…

Anubis knows everything he needs to know, now.

#

She tells this to General Hammond, and watches him age ten years in seconds.

They had assumed - thought - hoped - that Anubis was only looking at her. For her. Because she was the one the Furlings meddled with.

They can't assume that now. They don't dare.

There is one last thing to try. A plan she considered and rejected unsuggested months before. Suicidal. Giving too much power to one of their worst enemies. An enemy so powerful that they think - they're pretty sure - he's still alive, even after all Anubis has done against the System Lords.

But there's nothing else to try now.

She tells General Hammond. He okays it.

She takes the Eye of Ra and Gates to Dakara.

Alone.

#

It is strange and a little disorienting to be out in the open air again after so long.

Baal's Jaffa capture her immediately and take her to him.

She is carrying no weapons, no GDO, nothing but the Eye of Ra. This is a one-way trip.

"Kneel before your god!"

"Oh, please," she mutters, on her knees, staring at the floor. Even now, playing out a desperate endgame - Fool's Mate? - it's hard to take this stuff seriously.

" _Tau'ri_." She hears the familiar _Goa'uld_ voice from the throne above her. "To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?"

"Lord Baal?"

She only got a glimpse of him before the Jaffa knocked her down. A young bearded man reclining on a throne.

"Who are you? Why have you sought me out?"

"To bring you a gift, Lord Baal. To tell you that which you may not yet know."

The Jaffa have already searched her, and presented him with the Eye of Ra. She has his interest. Temporarily.

"A god knows all."

"Not if another god conceals knowledge from him."

"Leave us," Baal tells the Jaffa.

She stays where she is. Gods, even false ones, can be proud and touchy.

"You may rise," he tells her.

She gets to her feet. Studies him curiously. Baal is regarding the Eye of Ra, but when he feels her gaze upon him, he looks at her in turn. His eyes flash.

Even after all this time, the sight fills her with the same feeling. Anger enough to make her reckless. When they were prisoners of the _Goa'uld_ she used to taunt them. Jack called it 'snake-baiting.' She would goad them to fury … god, she still remembers the pain of being ribboned. Too many times.

But now she's not here to fight.

"You are Danielle Jackson, SG-1."

"Yes." 

If she's right, she's all that's left of SG-1 now.

If she's wrong, then Jack and the others have escaped from wherever they are. And Jack has gotten home to be told that General Hammond has let her kill herself. Which is what this is.

Suicide, if she's lucky.

But the stakes justify it.

He'd do the same, in her place.

"You are foolish beyond even what I would expect of the _Tau'ri_ , to come to my stronghold. Anubis has taken your mate. No doubt you wish to come to some accommodation with me."

Baal's words sink in.

Anubis _does_ have the others.

Her last fantasies - not really believed, but comforting nevertheless - of their safety, of some last-minute rescue, quietly die.

He studies her. She stares back boldly. She wonders what he expects. She wonders what she could possibly offer him that could change things for Jack. Nothing that she can imagine herself giving up. The _Goa'uld_ do not keep their promises.

"I wish to do what I have said, Lord Baal. To give you information. Nothing more."

After which, if he is at all merciful, he will kill her. She is willing to beg for that. But even if he does make her a host, they've been warned to expect that, back home. General Hammond recalled every team that was offworld before she went. He has changed every single code the SGC has; warned all their allies. Against her. Against Jack, Sammy, even Teal'c. The moment she stepped through the Gate, she was declared an enemy of Earth. If she's seen again by anyone, they'll assume she's a _Goa'uld_. Capture will be a distant second-best on the SGC's list of priorities, though perhaps the Tok'ra could free her, as they once did Skaara.

"I could make you a host. Then I would have all you know."

She does not wish to be a host. It is her greatest nightmare.

Or it was, once. She actually has worse ones now.

She smiles. Baal looks faintly startled.

"Were I to be any host but yours, Lord Baal, that _Goa'uld_ would have more power than you do. Perhaps it would amuse you to hear me out as you consider."

"Perhaps. Speak, then."

She tells him what Anubis is. What Anubis plans, and how he will achieve it.

"He will rule the Galaxy alone, and you will die."

Baal reaches out and strokes her face.

His touch is soothing, and she thinks she must have finally gone mad. But then she realizes that it's because she's actually going to die - or become a host - very soon. Either way, the business of trying to find a solution to the insoluble problem of their future is about to be over. No one will rescue her from this. Perhaps some day someone will kill the _Goa'uld_ that takes her, if she is unable to bargain for death. She closes her eyes.

"You should have come to me long ago, little _Tau'ri_. Now it may be too late. Anubis is on his way here even now. He wishes to consummate our alliance."

She looks at him, unable to summon up any emotion at all. He stares into her eyes, and once again he seems puzzled, as if he does not see what he expects to see.

Fear?

Does he think she should fear him? She is long past fear. It has been two years and two months since she walked through Kelowna's Stargate back to Earth, a year and a day since the death of Abydos. If Jack is not dead, he is almost certainly a _Goa'uld_ in the service of Anubis at this very moment.

She is long past fear.

_Goodbye, and goodbye, and goodbye._

She has not yet lost everything - the Galaxy may yet be saved - but she has lost everything she cares about. She looks into Baal's glowing eyes and smiles.

_Whatever you do to me, it will be better than what I am now._

It is Baal who looks away first.

"Come," Baal says. "Show me this machine."

She takes him to it, accompanied by a phalanx of Jaffa. She has been to Dakara in The Other Reality, seen the - deactivated - Ancient machine. Eighteen months in Atlantis has taught her to read Ancient fluently. She opens the curtain wall, reveals the device.

"Here it is."

"Ultimate power," Baal croons. "How does it work?"

"I have no idea," she says.

Baal rounds on her, eyes flaring in angry suspicion.

"I'm a linguist!" she tells him, irritated at last by his paranoia. "An archaeologist! Anubis knows what it does, and how to make it work. I might be able to read enough of what's written on the walls here to figure it out - in a couple of months - with Sammy - Major Carter - to help me. But Anubis has her. And you don't have a couple of months. Anubis is coming now, and this is what he wants."

"Indeed it is. And you have provided it," a new voice says.

Despite the buzzing _Goa'uld_ overlay, the voice is familiar.

She hears herself whimper in despair.

Anubis strides forward, his Jaffa behind him. Two of them are holding Sammy. She is battered and bruised. There is a collar around her neck. But she is - Dani thinks - still human.

Teal'c, she is sure, is already dead.

She stares at Anubis, searching for the familiar. His shimmering robes conceal everything. A mask conceals his face. But she knows. 

They all know something of the host survives, a prisoner inside its own body. Is it true even for those Anubis takes?

"What is the meaning of this?" Baal demands.

"I have come to consummate our alliance, Lord Baal," Anubis says.

"Oh god," she says. "Fight him! _Jack!"_

Baal barks out an order, raising his hand to lash out against Anubis with his ribbon device. It fountains off Anubis's robes and personal shield harmlessly. The Jaffa - Baal's, Anubis's - turn on one another, firing their staff weapons. She sees Sammy fall.

Chaos. Confusion. She picks up one of the staff weapons and fights, knowing it's useless. Anubis does not need his Jaffa to win. He has the Ancient weapon now. She fires at the device itself, but as she feared, the staff weapon does not harm it.

They've lost. The Galaxy has lost. A last desperate gamble, tried too late.

She wants it all to be over.

She has tried for so long to do right, to do good.

_I love you,_ she thinks, down on her knees beside the pedestal of the Ancient weapon, and does not know who she is thinking it to. Daniel. Jack. All her dead.

_Goodbye._

Then she is…

Elsewhere.

#

She walks into the diner with a disoriented sense of déjà vu.

Wasn't she just… someplace else?

The door shuts behind her with a jingle. She stops, looking around.

It's late afternoon … somewhere. There's a blue film on the plate-glass window - sun protection - blurring the street scene so she can't quite see out.

She takes another hesitant step forward.

The sign - in English - says _'Please Seat Yourself.'_ She stares at it as if she's never seen English before.

She was on Dakara. She went to Dakara to try to get Baal to destroy the Ancient machine before Anubis got it, because Anubis had Jack and was at last free to act.

But Anubis came. He has the machine now. Or she thinks he must have. Her memories after the shooting started are a little hazy.

And she's … here. In civilian clothes. Jeans, t-shirt, jacket, sandals.

Where is 'here,' exactly?

It looks familiar.

She walks forward, finds a booth, sits down.

No menus.

A waitress comes over.

"What'll it be?"

"Just coffee, thanks," she says automatically.

Stunned numbness fades, and grief rushes in to fill its place.

Jack is dead.

He's dead. Worse than dead. She delivered him up to Anubis.

Anubis has won. She's failed. He has what he wanted from the beginning.

Her world - her Galaxy - her universe - is gone.

Jack is gone.

Grief chokes her. It is as if Time has collapsed. The last two years have vanished. She has lost Daniel. She has lost Jack. Worlds. Universes. Lives. Herself.

She cannot go on doing this. Living this.

She can't.

The waitress sets down her coffee.

"Rough day, honey?"

She can't even make a sound.

The waitress leaves.

She stares at the cup in front of her, too shocked by pain and the unreality of everything around her to even think of crying. The coffee is in a normal heavy white china diner cup. It's black and it steams. It smells like coffee. She reaches out for the cup, tentatively. The last time she hurt this much she pretended that she didn't. No one suspected the truth. The real truth. There are many versions and variations of the truth.

Is she dead?

Is she insane?

If she has gone mad, when did she do it? Before she went to Dakara? After? Is this some trick of Anubis's? Why would he bother?

She reaches for the sugar shaker. Her hands are steady. She adds sugar to her coffee. Stirs it. Sips. It's the best coffee she's ever had.

There is no pain, though her ulcer really should complain.

She takes a deep breath. Another sip of the coffee.

Finally looks around.

This is eerie.

She knows this place.

Nick brought her here after the funeral. Her parents' funeral. They'd died in New York, and there'd been a horrible week, and then the bodies - and she - had been shipped out to Chicago for the funeral. Jake - her parents' assistant - had made all the flight arrangements, and flown back with her. Her parents were buried in Chicago because the Orientalist Institute had made the funeral arrangements, and that was where her father had been teaching at the time, not because Chicago was any more home than any other place. They'd lived a lot of places. Usually Egypt. She'd been born in Alexandria. She'd barely escaped being named Alexandria, in fact. But she's named for her other grandfather, her father's father. Which is also - barely - better than being named Nicolette. Or Nicola. Not that her father would ever have considered letting her be named for Nicholas Ballard.

She knows she's babbling internally, trying to hold the impossibility of this unreality at bay. She can't be here. _Here_ can't be here.

She wants Jack. She wants Daniel. She wants to go home, and she doesn't even know where that is.

_Backward, turn backward, O'Time, in thy flight…_

Nick had met her at the chapel where the service was held, taken charge of her. Told everyone he was her grandfather. Which was, in fact, true. Went to the cemetery with her so she could watch the coffins lowered into the earth.

He'd brought her here afterward. _Here._ She had waffles. He just had coffee. He said she was going to come and live with him now, but only if she promised not to cry, because he hated crying girls. She promised that she never would.

And she never did.

And now she's here again.

Is this death? To spend the rest of her life in a diner? She was expecting something else.

Oblivion, perhaps. The Hall of Judgment, maybe; her heart weighed against a feather. Not the Christian Heaven and Hell, but she doesn't rule it out completely. Something a little more definitive would be nice, though.

The waitress brings her several refills as she sits and waits. Nothing else happens. There are other people in the diner, but they all ignore her. The woman asks her several times if she wants to order, and she finally does, just for something to do. Waffles.

Jack is gone. The world is gone. They did their best. She _tried._

Nothing worked.

What else could she have done?

Why is she here?

She cannot do this again.

Cannot play another Furling game.

Cannot revisit more ghosts of her beloved dead.

_Can't, Jack. Sorry._

She wants to go where he is. Wherever that is.

But she knows he'd want her to wait. Just a little while. See what's going on. Gather intel. 

_Play for time and never assume._

She owes him that much.

"Hey?" she says, when the woman brings her order. "Can I ask you a question?"

"I got a minute," the woman says.

"What am I doing here?"

"Eating breakfast," the woman says, nodding toward her plate.

She sighs. No answers there.

The waffles are good, though.

She can't imagine why she's got an appetite.

She's almost finished when Daniel walks in.

#

_"Daniel!"_

She jumps up and runs to him. But when she tries to touch him, her hand passes right through him.

Ascended? Illusion?

He isn't wearing his glasses.

He cannot see or hear her.

But she can see and hear him.

He looks confused.

He walks past her, takes a seat. She stares after him.

This is the diner where Nick took her when her parents died.

The diner where Nick took Daniel when his parents died.

(Same Nick. Same parents. Same diner. Different universes.)

The diner where…

Where Daniel came when he died aboard the Replicator ship. He told her a little about it, though he never put it into any report he made to the SGC. Because he remembers being here in the diner, though he doesn't remember anything between here and showing up naked in Jack's office back at the SGC.

She suspects - strongly - that he may not have told her everything about what happened here. But then, she's just finished a graduate-level course on the wisdom of keeping secrets, hasn't she?

She goes back to her booth and sits down. The waitress goes over to Daniel. She can hear every word they say.

He figures things out more quickly than she did.

The waitress is Oma Desala, and this is - must be - Daniel's second death and Ascension.

But the time is out of joint. It's only been two years for her. His second Ascension would be - is - several years after that. Three? About that. She was on The Other Side then.

Forget about that just now.

So. The Ascension Diner. That answers one question, and raises others.

She shouldn't be here. She was never a candidate for Ascension.

So… why?

#

"Tell me why I'm here?" she asks Oma when she - the Ascended waitress - returns to refill her coffee. One good thing about death; apparently it's cured her ulcer.

"Why is anyone anywhere?" Oma responds.

"Please?" 

Because this is where you go to decide whether you're going to Ascend or die, and as far as she knows, she's only got one choice. Well, die or stay here forever. That's two choices.

Oma sighs. "The only knowledge of true worth is that which comes from within," she answers.

Dani rests her forehead on the table in frustration. Does Oma mean she already knows? Or that she has to figure it out for herself?

Or does she mean that the Furlings weren't supposed to cheat?

Maybe that's it.

This is all about the Furlings and the Ascended, anyway, not about her. She's always just been caught in the middle.

The Furlings made her into a sort of fake Ascended. Because they can't Ascend? Or aren't let to? Or refuse to?

Anyway, they wanted the information about Ascension without playing by the rules the Ascended follow.

Probably why they built the quantum mirror-or-mirrors in the first place. But the quantum mirrors didn't do what they needed them to.

So they … built … her.

And the Ascended didn't like it, apparently. At least enough so that she's here, in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, watching Daniel play out his own endgame.

It's good to see him again, even if he doesn't know she's here.

Did he know how things were going to go for her? Did he hope for a different outcome? She doesn't know the answer to the first, and she's certain of the answer to the second.

It hurts more than she can bear to think about to have lost Jack … again. To know that Anubis won.

What is she going to do? Walk out the door and she's dead. But she can't Ascend.

Should she go?

_Play for time._

So she waits.

Daniel discovers who 'Jim' is.

That's something he didn't tell her.

The fat man catches her eye. Winks at her, grinning.

Horror and fury stop her breath. She starts to get to her feet.

Oma frowns at her, shaking her head slightly.

She sits back, shaking. He saw her. He can see her. He has come here to gloat over her, over Daniel.

But Ascended omniscience is not perfect. Anubis's omniscience isn't perfect.

Or he would know he is about to fail in Daniel's world.

Yes.

It is the final piece of the puzzle.

He has destroyed her world. Before Daniel's. He is bloated with overconfidence, certain that what he has done once, he can do again.

But he won't. He only thinks he will. He's overconfident.

And so he will fail.

She thought he read her mind, back in her reality, but it must have been something … different. He must only have been able to see her actions. Even taking Jack doesn't give him the information to win in Daniel's world, because she never knew what made him lose there. And she knows a host can conceal information. Perhaps Jack concealed that. Or perhaps Anubis never bothered to look. All he wanted from Jack was the information to destroy her world, after all. The _Goa'uld_ are arrogant and overconfident. He would have been hurrying to Dakara to take it and her.

But she's here now, and so is Anubis. And he, obviously, is confident that he will win, again, in Daniel's world.

And she knows that he will not. Because he didn't, and that's already happened. Because if he'd won in Daniel's world, she'd never have gone back to hers.

She wouldn't be here now.

He will not win in Daniel's world. Because he won in hers.

As the Ascended intended?

She has been a pawn, but a powerful one. 

Her world is gone. But because of the information she carried back with her - and gave to Anubis, whether she wanted to or not - Daniel's is - will be - was - safe.

Nature abhors a paradox even more than a vacuum.

She drinks her coffee. Tears trickle slowly down her face. She brushes them away, absently, with the back of her hand.

And waits.

There is a flare of light as Oma and Anubis merge in battle. Forever. Across all universes. She gets to her feet and watches it rise toward the ceiling of the diner, pass through.

Vanish.

Now she knows how - and why - Anubis was stopped in Daniel's world.

It was Daniel.

And it wasn't.

#

"Dani?"

Daniel is staring at her, looking completely baffled.

He can _see_ her.

"Daniel?"

She steps forward, reaches out hesitantly.

She can _touch_ him.

He holds her tightly. She clings to him. Her first husband.

In his reality, they are already lovers. Have been for some time. Eight months from now - there - they will marry. He's already in love with her. Back in his world, she doesn't suspect a thing. Eventually she'll figure out her feelings, and that their marriage of convenience is actually just … a marriage.

"Daniel, I-" But she mustn't say anything now. And so she doesn't know what to say at all.

Because he'll remember everything that happens here when he goes back.

Which is why he never told her he saw her here.

Though she suspects, somehow, that she's just given away her feelings. Or the feelings her other self will eventually realize she has.

_The time is out of joint…_

"This is very confusing," he says against her hair.

"It's been a really bad day," she says. That much seems safe.

"You know I-" he begins.

"I'm dead," they say at the same moment.

They look at each other.

"I've got to go back," he says.

"I don't know how," she says. 

She knows you have to Ascend first, to go back. But where is she going to go? Is this the end of her life? She isn't sure. Even if she _does_ manage to Ascend, she can't go back with Daniel. She's already there.

He smiles. "If you've gotten this far, I can show you the rest."

#

He takes off her glasses and sets them aside. She doesn't actually need them now. Not here.

She isn't actually here, in any corporeal sense of the word.

"Let go," he tells her. "You can do this."

Release her burden. That's the way it's supposed to go. But terror and grief have been a part of her for so long. A quarter of her life now. And not being good enough - that, for even longer. From the moment she scrabbled at the coverstone, trying to pull it off her parents' bodies, she's known she wasn't good enough, and never would be.

Blood under her fingernails, staining a child's hands.

Sha're's blood, on the stones at Abydos.

There was blood at Dakara. She remembers now. Sammy bled. She crawled toward her. They crawled toward each other. Sammy died before she could reach her.

She has to let all of that go. And believe the one thing she has never been able to believe.

That she can do what Daniel has done.

That she is capable of what Daniel is capable of.

She must not think - if she learns this truth - that if she'd learned it earlier she could have saved her universe. What happened there is - it must be - for something so worth their sacrifice that she can bear to leave that destruction untouched. That it was for saving all the universes that Anubis might touch and defile.

So the time in which this happens, if it happens, is the time at which it was meant to be. Not sooner. Not later. Just now.

She reaches toward … something. She feels as if she's being taken apart.

But she feels Daniel's faith in her. And in Oma Desala. A faith renewed, because Oma's error created Anubis long ago and she has atoned - if the Ascended have such a concept - for that mistake now. Has cleansed the universe - all the universes there are - of Anubis.

Cleansed.

Reborn.

As she can be reborn, if she just … lets go.

And she does.

Because in every reality there is, every possibility was meant to be.

#

Ascension is nothing like what she imagined.

Confusing.

Interesting.

Daniel has somewhere to be.

And she has somewhere to find.

Home.

#

She searches for Jack. Both love and loyalty compel her. But though there is an … absence … of Time where she is, she cannot find the place from which she has just come. She sees many Jack O'Neills, but none of them is hers. She even finds other Danielle Jacksons. Daniel told only the truth. In her world, she and Jack only did sooner what they would have done eventually. In the other universes she sees, they are happy together.

And when - perhaps - one of her other selves seems as if she might forget how fragile such happiness is, Dani reminds that other self that Now is all there is. And that happiness is easily lost.

It occupies her for a while.

It isn't really meddling.

It is the only gift she can give - herself - Jack - across universes.

It is the only way she can say goodbye.

She never got to say goodbye.

But none of the places she visits is home.

She knows where home is.

It is time to go there.

#

The Ascended lose all memory of their time in Ascension when they … descend. At least Daniel did, both times, and he's what she has to go by. And from her own experience, she thinks it's a pretty good rule, if it is a rule. When she goes back, she'll remember nothing from after she left the Ascension Diner.

She has a choice, though.

She can remember even less.

Forget the last two years. The endgame she couldn't win. Going back to her own universe and everything she did there.

Jack.

She's loved him a third of her life. Still does. Always will. But if she does this, she will lose the last two years.

The last year.

Their marriage.

Telling him she loves him.

Hearing that he loves her.

Their first kiss.

Their last.

Everything between.

Worth it?

The events and her memories of them will still exist. But they will be accessible only if she is here. In the entirely-improbable event that she Ascends again, she will know these things again. And if Daniel Ascends again, he will know that she, despite all protests, is capable of doing so as well, and will remind her.

So there's one loophole preserved.

Or, as Jack would think of it, an extraction route.

Oblivion will be the more comfortable route. The one more likely to allow her marriage - her first marriage, rejoined in progress - to run smoothly. She does not need to return to it scarred by annihilation and failure. Daniel lived through that once with her. It is unfair to ask him to do it twice.

But that thought is self-serving and convenient, and for that reason she mistrusts it. The power she currently possesses tells her that there is more, and she looks for it.

Yes.

The Furlings.

The trap and riddle that they made of her was denatured in those last instants in Daniel's arms, and so they sent her back to her own world, where it took on a terrible life once more. She has a choice, now, and the Ascended have left her - typically - to find her own way.

Return, all her incarnate memories intact, and she will head down a road that will lead, with absolute certainty, to Humanity once more being offered Furling gifts. Gifts she does not have the power to refuse, and dares not allow Humanity to accept.

Or… forget. Lose the memory of her love - yes, her dearest and first love. Give Jack up, and in giving him up, ensure that the Furlings do not come.

Not this year and not next. Perhaps not for a very long time.

She knows the choice Jack would want her to make. The right choice. She will do what he would have done. Because, in the end, she became what he wanted her to be. What he made of her.

So giving him up isn't really giving him up at all.

She will always love him.

Even if she will never remember that he loved her as well.

#

She's lying on the bed without a stitch on. Stark naked and freezing cold.

She can't remember how she got here.

She was sitting in the living room, watching _The Wizard of Oz._ Jack's obscurely-appropriate wedding present. She can still hear it. They're up to the end credits.

Daniel walks in, yawning. "Did I fall asleep?" he asks. "You were-" He stops, blinking, at the sight of her. "Did you decide to start without me?"

She sits up. "There was something…" She frowns. "I can't remember."

"Sleepwalking?" he suggests. "We're both pretty tired."

"Maybe that's it. Come to bed." She curls her toes and shivers. Her cold feet. His problem.

"I'll just shut off the television."

#

She never does find the clothes she was wearing that night. Or her glasses.

And she never does remember.

But it's a small matter.

She's home.

There's no place like home.

#

EPILOGUE:

Washington.

Ten years later.

Jack's retirement party.

He and Sam never married, and if they ever had a _thing_ they kept it very quiet. Would have had to, for the sake of Brigadier General Sam Carter's career. She's in line to head up the SGC as soon as Hank Landry retires - or, as seems very likely, moves over to head up Homeworld Security in Jack's place. No chance of that if there was a hint of the idea that she'd gotten the job because she was sleeping with the head of Homeworld Security.

If she ever did.

Pretty long commute.

Sam came back to the SGC a year or so after Dani and Daniel returned from Atlantis. A three-year tour in R&D was quite enough for her. She was happy to be back on the front lines.

Colonel Mitchell never did get 'the band' back together. Never understood why he couldn't, though Dani could have told him. She'd liked him, in a way. Cluelessness had always entertained her, and Jack must have been a bit like him, when Jack was very young.

But what Mitchell had never realized was that SG-1 had never been anything like a traditional military unit. Oh, possibly he could have ordered Sam back into the fold - if she'd been anywhere near the SGC when he'd been reforming SG-1. Because Sam was military, and had to follow orders.

And Sam had known there could never be another SG-1. Not the way it had been. And so she'd taken care to be far away for as long as it took.

For the rest…

Teal'c? Never happen. While Teal'c had technically been a member of the SGC, he'd followed Jack, and Jack alone, out of love and loyalty. Jack had earned both, that day in the dungeon on Chulak. Teal'c would follow Jack as he would follow no one else among the _Tau'ri_. No one else.

She - and Daniel - same person, really, when you were talking about SG-1 - had also really followed Jack rather than orders. She'd always really thought of it as taking Jack's suggestions under advisement, anyway. Which didn't work out very well when someone else was in command. Look at what had happened when they gave SG-1 to Makepeace.

Jack had earned the right to order her around on Abydos. Jack was her friend. Mitchell could make neither claim, of her or Daniel.

Like so many people, but this time with a loftier moral purpose, and with the best of intentions, Cameron Mitchell wanted what Jack O'Neill had, and never did understand why he couldn't have it.

The new SG-1 worked well, though, through all its deaths and shakedowns. And hey, they got a robot. Android. Whatever.

Although why it had to look the way Daniel did twenty years ago was beyond her.

R&D's idea of a joke.

But all that is past. Ten years of past. Tonight is a celebration.

Odd to celebrate endings.

Jack leaving forever.

Gone forever.

Jack.

#

He is pretty sure he's never seen Dani this drunk in her life.

She's picked a fine time.

He wonders what set her off. They're doing fine at the SGC.

He doubts anyone but him could tell. Daniel could, but Daniel is on the other side of the room. Talking to somebody. Drinking ginger ale.

Because Daniel - usually - doesn't drink.

And Dani - usually - does.

And usually holds her liquor just fine.

And never gets staggering drunk at important parties.

Not that she's staggering.

But she's wearing high heels, and the floor is polished marble. She's standing just a fraction too still. Alone for a moment, though both she and Daniel have been doing a lot of meet'n'greet this evening. Old friends from the SGC, come to see him off. But even from where he's standing, he can see that the ice in her glass doesn't move. Scotch, not champagne. Most of the people here are drinking champagne. It's a celebration, after all. The much-decorated warhorse being put out to pasture at last.

He won't miss Washington at all. Meetings, ass-kissing, and back-stabbing. People who make little Bobby Kinsey look like a pattern-card of virtue. O'Neill's looking forward to a long retirement in Minnesota. His well-earned pension. Forgetting most of what he's done in his life. Kicking back. Catching fish. Or not.

He just has to get through one last party first.

And frankly, he doesn't actually care whether or not most of the people here get faced on the taxpayer's dime. But he'd like to keep his friends from making fools of themselves.

He looks around for Carter. Finds her - in her own knot of admirers - catches her eye. Nods toward Daniel. Indicates Dani. Carter nods back; she's gotten the message.

But it will take her a while to work her way loose, get to Daniel, and extract him.

He works his way out of his own knot of babbling Beltway insiders - carefully, using skills he's learned over the last twelve years - and across the floor to Daniel's wife. By the time he does she's holding a fresh drink, and is deep in conversation with the Vietnamese wife of one of the Senators on the Homeworld Security Commission. He can't understand a word they're saying, though he heard enough of the language when he was a kid. On the ground in places the US wasn't supposed to be. And officially never was.

They both turn toward him when he approaches. Dani switches instantly to English.

"—and I'm sure you don't need me to introduce the two of you to each other, Mrs. Wellesley. Jack, Madame Ngo was just telling me about what a _fascinating_ life you've led here in Washington."

It's faintly reassuring that even in this condition she remembers how bad he is with names. 

Ngo Wellesley regards him with the sort of composure that indicates she's just waiting to pull his wings off and eat him. Dani doesn't _look_ drunk. She's bright-eyed and a little flushed, but it's hot in here. Or sound drunk. Again, unless you know her.

"I'm sure it wasn't nearly as interesting as your time with the Stargate Program itself, General O'Neill. It's a pity you won't be able to write a book about your experiences," the Senator's wife says sweetly.

Senator Wellesley is a big fan of the idea the Stargate should be made public knowledge.

"I'm pretty sure it would cut into my fishing time," O'Neill says. "Planning on doing a lot of that. Warren should take up fishing. It'd be good for him."

Ngo inclines her head gracefully and moves away.

"What did you say to her?" O'Neill asks, once the two of them are alone.

"Tincture of tobacco is good against aphids," Dani says. He can hear a faint slurring in her voice now. He looks at her sharply.

"We talked about gardening," she explains, the tone of her voice clearly indicating that any idiot should know that.

Any idiot who spoke Vietnamese and who knew Warren Wellesley's wife better than Jack O'Neill ever did. Or ever wanted to.

Dani doesn't garden. She's wildly allergic to flowering plants, among other things. But she'll read anything.

"Why don't we go get some air?" O'Neill says.

#

He takes her arm and guides her out toward the balcony. This farewell reception is being held in the Skytop Room of the Excelsior Hotel in downtown Washington. They're thirty stories up, and Dani - like Daniel - has a little problem with heights. But they can stay away from the railing. Right now the cold air - it's October - and privacy are worth coming out here for.

But to his surprise - and horror - she walks right over to the railing and leans out. She'll be over the side in a moment. Four-inch heels.

He grabs her.

She falls back against him.

The event is black-tie formal. That means Dress Blues for the military, evening dress for civilians. Daniel is in a tuxedo. Dani's in an evening gown. Fifty this year, and she can still get away with quite a lot. The outfit she's wearing looks right out of old _Star Trek._ She looks like she's dressed until she turns around. Or moves. Then you realize that the long-sleeved high-necked dress is completely backless, and though it is ankle-length, it's slit up to mid-thigh on one side. Gold high heels - they match the dress - add to the suspense of wondering whether it's going to fall off, or she's going to fall down, or whether - dressed like that - she's actually a _Goa'uld_ come to take over Washington, because the fabric of the dress is pretty sheer, and if not for the fact that it's sequined or studded or whatever, it might be transparent. Hard to tell, because it also seems to be sprayed on.

He wonders if she went out and bought it, or just grabbed it out of the SGC Archives.

Bought it, probably, because Hank is here too and while the he and Hank have very different command styles, Hank Landry definitely knows what goes on in his SGC, and would notice if one of his archaeologists showed up in Washington decked out in _Goa'uld_ regalia.

Although where she got it isn't as important as the fact that when he grabs her, the end result is that he's got a half-naked armful of his best friend's very drunk wife.

"Hey, Dana. What's goin' on?" he asks quietly.

"Dani, Jack. Danielle … Jackson."

This is not encouraging. As far as the world knows, she's Dana Ballard; she didn't take Daniel's name when they married. She's been Dana Ballard for over seventeen years now.

"Okay. Dani."

He walks her a few steps away from the railing before he's willing to let go of her. He makes sure he's the one with his back to the balcony railing, too. Just in case - for some reason peculiar to the species Jackson - she's thinking of jumping over the railing tonight.

"That's right. And you're Jack. And you're leaving."

Leaving Washington, not the planet. As far as he knows, not a catastrophe. Not enough reason for her to tie one on as if this were a wake.

Where the _hell_ is Daniel?

"Yeah. Going home."

She smiles faintly, as if what he's said contains some deep hidden meaning known only to God, drunks, and deranged archaeologists.

She moves toward him. 

Does she want to kiss him? That would dump them into a fine mess, though he's sure Daniel wouldn't hold it against either of them.

"I'm not your Jack, Dani," he says gently.

He knows there was something there. They all do. One of the reasons she was so desperate to get home, back in the beginning.

Back when it was home. A long time ago.

"I know that," she says, sounding faintly patronizing.

She holds out her hand between them, palm up, and then tilts it to the side. "Fourteen… and fifteen. Almost even," she says. "And now you're leaving too."

He has no idea what she's talking about.

"It's paired asymmetries, you see," she says, articulating just a little too carefully. "Symbolic ritual communication by means of mirrored opposites presented in a prepared tableau." 

He knows she's drunk, but unfortunately for him, she sounds this way sober, too. 

"And I know you're not … him … but I wish you were, just for a minute, because I need to- I need to tell-"

"Hey, Dani." 

Daniel strolls out onto the balcony, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his tuxedo, and O'Neill feels a sharp pang of relief. Daniel will get her out of here, and they can all pretend this never happened.

Whatever it is that just hasn't happened.

At the sound of Daniel's voice she turns around so fast that she does, finally, stagger, and O'Neill has to catch her again. He sets her upright as quickly as he can, but he can tell she's going to trip the moment she tries to move, and not - actually - from too much Scotch. Back in the very beginning, Daniel simply _could not_ think, talk, and walk at the same time, and the one of the three that got short-changed was, of course, walking. He'd trip, fall, run into walls and doors. Developing a terrible reputation for clumsiness. All he needed to do in order to shed the gawkiness of delayed adolescence was to learn to _shut up_ and do one thing at a time.

It took a while.

Enough stress brings it back. In Dani more than in Daniel.

He knows she hates parties, but _this much?_

"You don't have to tell him anything. He always knew."

'Knew.' Daniel's talking about the other one, then.

"Are you sure?"

He wonders what she's suddenly so desperate for a dead man to know, seventeen years too late.

"You know he knew everything."

Daniel _can't_ be talking about him, in any variation. But Dani seems to think he is, because she nods, satisfied.

Daniel holds out his hand. She walks over to him. Steadily, all things considered. Daniel puts an arm around her shoulders. Glances back at him.

"I'll call you in the morning. We'll talk," Daniel says.

He nods, though he's not completely sure he wants an explanation. Leaves the balcony and goes back inside. The last thing they need is anyone barging in - or out - on them right now. And people will be looking for him. The man of the hour.

But as he stands there, just inside the doors, contemplating his next move, he can still hear them perfectly clearly, though their voices are low.

"Daniel, if I did - if he knew - what would he - did he - he never - we never –"

Okay, he's figured it out now.

And Daniel, O'Neill thinks, is definitely the better man. If Sara had picked their twelfth year of wedded bliss to get paralytic and then confess feelings for someone else - even someone who's both dead and nonexistent - all he has to say is that she'd better not have been standing on a 30th floor balcony when she did it.

It doesn't seem to have surprised Danny Boy, though. Sounds like a conversation they might have had before.

"You were both on SG-1," O'Neill hears him say. "He couldn't say anything. But you can see it. Here. Paired asymmetries."

Okay, a conversation that _makes no sense_ that they've had before. How can you pair a symmetry, let alone an asymmetry? If it's an asymmetrical pair, then what is it a pair of?

"Are you sure? Daniel?"

She sounds hopeful. O'Neill isn't sure what the whole point is. If this is about his Alternate Universe self, the man has been dead for almost 20 years. Dani has been married to Daniel for more than twelve. Anything else is over and done.

"Oh, I'm sure." Daniel sounds both amused and fond. "I'll prove it to you in a couple of months."

O'Neill isn't sure what that means, either, but he makes a mental note to stay far away from both Daniel and Dani for the next little while. More than a little while. Maybe a year.

He walks back into the ballroom.

Carter finds him. "Trouble?" she asks.

"All fixed now. I think."

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Dani and Daniel crossing the floor. Her arm is tucked through his, and nobody would guess how much she's had to drink. Good.

"Dani had a few too many," he adds, knowing Carter will want an explanation.

Carter frowns. "That isn't like her."

O'Neill grins faintly. "It's _exactly_ like her, Sam, just not in a place like this. Don't know why he doesn't drown her. I would've. Long time ago."

Carter grins back. "Must be love."

He allows his gaze to soften, lingering on Carter, who is easy on the eye, and is wearing something - dress uniform - that has fewer alarming possibilities than a dress that looks as if it might fall off at any moment. Call him craven, but he's just not interested in that much excitement.

But a few more hours, and he'll be out of here. A civilian again. Odd, considering how badly he and the Air Force have bumped along together, but he's been military almost his entire adult life. Retired twice before. This time retirement should stick. Free at last of all the fiddling rules and regulations about what he can and cannot do and say, who he can and cannot speak to.

Or date.

So to speak.

He has no interest in marrying again - too old, too set in his ways, and far too undomesticated - but it will be good to be able to kiss the girl without either of them having to look over their shoulders. It wasn't that it was forbidden by regulations even after Sam moved back to the SGC. It was simply that - as both of them knew - it could easily be made to look bad. And the only one who could be hurt by it was Sam. She was - and is - still building her career.

But a - very retired - three-star General is a safe liaison, one that won't affect her career future. He still means for her to head up the SGC, and he knows that's what she wants. He'll be in Minnesota. She'll visit.

He may have to make some improvements at the cabin. An inside shower. Maybe a bathtub. A bigger bed. Things like that.

"Jack?"

"I was thinking about home improvements."

She looks amused and disgusted - the same look she's given him for years when she's suspected him of not paying attention. He _is_ paying attention. But his priorities have changed now.

He's going home.

Finally.

There's no place like home.

And - sometimes - Sam will be there.

#

They walk back to their hotel. Only a few blocks, and Dani brought flats with her.

She is, there is no denying it, thoroughly intoxicated. But the last place alcohol goes - he knows from experience - is to her coordination. She's good for the walk.

And in several dozen languages and a few dialects of English, her speech would still be perfectly unimpeded. An odd quirk, but one he's seen before.

Still, definitely drunk.

He's often wondered why she drinks and he doesn't. She started in college and he didn't, and they've never really figured out why. Just one of the … differences.

Jack overreacted, and that upset her. Or, to be perfectly precise, set her off. She was avoiding Jack tonight. Jack should have left it that way.

Daniel knows there's something there, buried under the surface. He just doesn't know what.

Not that she loves - loved - Jack on The Other Side. They both know that. They all know that, actually. He and Jack and Sam and Teal'c. The ones who know - best - who she … was.

Something to do with the other thing. The thing he knows and she doesn't.

About the diner. And her bad day.

He wonders about it sometimes. The Temporal Paradoxes involved are really more Sam's field, but he certainly can't ask her. This is one secret he has to keep.

Not a lie. He and Dani have never lied to each other. Just a secret. They do have a few.

To say he was surprised to see Dani there in the diner would be an understatement. It was - is - the halfway house to Ascension. She'd have to have been dead to have gotten that far. And Ascension wasn't supposed to be a possibility for her. That was the difference between them. The crucial difference.

Seeing her there, he'd wondered when she'd died. She hadn't even been scheduled to go offworld.

And she'd thrown herself into his arms and clung to him with a passion that he'd hoped for, for a long time. But which wasn't like the Dani he'd left behind.

And he'd wondered then where she'd come from. Or - more precisely - _when._

She was smart enough not to say, though. All she said was that she'd had a really bad day.

And then they'd left. Both of them. Because wherever she'd been, she'd learned … enough.

He'd never told her about seeing her there. But - maybe - it had been part of the reason he'd teased her into going to Atlantis with him a few months later. 

Or maybe not.

And when they got back from Atlantis…

At least he was finally pretty sure where she came back _to,_ after the diner. And so - logically - that's where she must have been taken away _from._

Taken away. Died. Killed.

She must have gotten to the diner somehow, after all.

He's not sure what he remembers about that night. They came home. They were watching the movie. He looked around and she was gone. He assumed he'd fallen asleep. He'd gone into the bedroom and found her there. It wasn't until the next day - when she couldn't find her glasses anywhere - or her clothes, her earrings, even the wedding ring she'd gotten made in Atlantis - that he put it together.

She'd come back from Ascension. That night.

She left the diner with him. He remembers that. And came back –to the world - almost three years later.

But what took her away from the house that night, and for how long, and killed her - on a very bad day - and brought her to the diner to begin with…

He doesn't know that, and probably never will.

_She_ does, though. On some level. Because those things have to have happened while she was alive. Somewhere. And she made herself forget them when she came back.

So thoroughly, that she never wondered very hard where all her things vanished to. Never wanted to know. Simply accepted that they were gone, and replaced them. And never talked about that night again.

And he knows - because Replicator Sam and Osirus both proved it to him - that the memories of Ascension remain, buried deep in the unconscious mind.

She undoubtedly has an excellent reason for burying the memories she has lost where she can't get at them.

And certainly they have something to do with Jack.

Hers.

Who will always be her first love, just as Sha're is his.

Is.

You don't stop loving someone just because they're dead.

Last loves are lasting, though.

Was she - somehow - with Jack when he died? Is that what tonight was all about? Leaving? Being left? Neither of them, Daniel knows, is really … good … about being left.

Doesn't matter.

They'll fly home in a couple of days. They're here through the weekend. Symposium. Ancient cultures. Working vacation. Once they're home, she'll settle again.

They reach their hotel and go in.

#

"He'll be glad to leave Washington," she says, coming out of the shower half an hour later. She's still helplessly obsessed with the thought of Jack and leaving; he knows if she'd had any idea of how the party would affect her tonight she would simply have bowed - gracefully or otherwise - out of the whole thing.

Nearly every culture has a proverb about wisdom gained too late.

The coffee has arrived from Room Service. He pours her a cup. She has a theory about caffeine and hangovers. He's willing to indulge it.

"Minnesota. Fishing," Daniel agrees. Although there are no fish in Jack's lake.

She takes the cup, sits down on the bed, leaning against the headboard. "'Going to regret this in the morning," she sighs. Not meaning the coffee.

"I think you scared him out of a year's growth."

"Coward," she says comprehensively.

She closes her eyes, tilts her head back against the headboard. "I wish…" she says.

She opens her eyes. Looks at him. Holds out a hand. "I don't," she says.

"I know," Daniel answers. He's the one she came back to, after all. He knows that, and always will. He comes and sits beside her. She tucks herself up under his arm with the ease of long practice.

"'Be good to get home."

They've both been a lot of places. Walked on the surface of more than a thousand worlds. Visited other galaxies. It's an informed opinion.

There's no place like home.

###

**Author's Note:**

> Getting Dani back to her own universe (at what was once, I swear, the _end_ of "A Mirror For Observers") required a hefty dose of SG-1 miracles. But what if there hadn't been an SG-1 Miracle? What if Dani just... stayed?
> 
> There was only one way to find out.
> 
> I blame Brad Paisley for "Whiskey Lullabye", which I had on repeat during the whole time I was writing this.


End file.
